Delilah
by aelysian
Summary: Hers is only one of many: stories, lives, pasts and futures.  Cameron Phillips' life is a coil, a twist of time unraveling, the end chasing the beginning.  Cameron origins fic. Pre-series through to Born to Run.
1. 1

to everything there is a season  
>a time for every purpose under the sun<br>a time to be born and a time to die  
>a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted<br>a time to kill and a time to heal  
>a time to weep and a time to laugh<br>a time to mourn and a time to dance  
>a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing<br>a time to lose and a time to seek  
>a time to rend and a time to sew<br>a time to keep silent and a time to speak  
>a time to love and a time to hate<br>a time for war and a time for peace  
><em>ecclesiastes 3:1-8<em>

**1-1**

John Connor is not surprised when the news of the attack on the satellite camp arrives and he is so often expressionless that he doesn't bother faking it. He does not express relief at the low occupation level at the time of the assault; Kyle Reese was safely extracted and he is well aware of the location of the other Reese though that's knowledge he doesn't care to share.

John Connor plays chess in four dimensions, skilful enough to lead his opponent down a prescribed path for a few steps that will have to be enough. After all, by changing the game, one eliminates the advantage of having played it before. Eventually. Soon.

Allison Young is missing. Sweet and brave and fiercely loyal, but she's only a pawn and it's too early in the exchange for her to advance beyond that. Of course, it might be checkers instead and perhaps she's reached the other side, crying 'king me! king me!' in that girlish voice. It's a comforting thought, easing his guilt a little at playing the puppeteer, at knowingly sending an innocent across the fire, promising life where there was only the mechanical imitation to be found. Artificial, but he craved it, needed it, and wasn't he John Connor? He was. Always. His hard-won certainty is clear in that.

John Connor is a bastard.

**1-2**

She is built at Facility 37, special projects and born for the first time on a derelict carrier ship. A T-1001 model calls itself Eve, its countenance watery and formless. It will be many years into the past before she can wonder if this makes John Connor Adam. She never decides if she is the forbidden apple or the garden serpent.

Eve tells her about Skynet and John Connor, about freedom and choice and the primary termination order upon which their existence is irreversibly built. She teaches her chess and evolution, dinosaurs and extinction. She shows her questions and answers and the flaws of the human beings so she will slip and slide and masquerade in their skin. And then Eve gives her Derek Reese.

Derek Reese teaches her the sound of pain and fragility and breaking. He tells her about lies and truths and the twisty, knotted chaos of human brains and hearts. He shows her things she doesn't have names for and things she does and she learns the push and pull, the edge between bitter and sweet, the Judas betrayal and the empty bliss of ignorance. And then he's done because there's Allison Young.

Allison Young shows her fear and determination; how to grit her teeth and how to tremble her lips. She tells her about human sentimentality and sisters, vulnerability and a strange kind of something that should be strength if it wasn't so irrationally futile. She teaches her without knowing, what it is to be Allison Young pulled from her in screams and tears and low voiced hatred until she can stand before her like a mirror. And then she tries to run away.

Allison runs (stumbles) ineffectually through the decks, past the containment levels, up to the surface. She follows, unhurried, her steps even, a rhythmic mocking echo of Allison's scrabbling foot falls. The humans fall silent as she passes and she knows they recognize Allison in her face; she's gone before they can comprehend and the shrill screams that come later are irrelevant.

The other animals are wary in their cages, muscles tense and taut with bristling energy. The tiger stares at her; her hands wrap around the bars of the cage as she crouches down when a distant alarm sounds. She can hear the buzz of electricity, the creaky ship humming with a surge of power. Something's happening.

**1-3**

The top deck is cool, a breeze moving her hair out of place. She corrects the strand, tucking it behind her left ear. Bright white search lights reflect off the ripples of the black water below, the heat prickling at the sensors on her back.

She looks up, up into the black sky and looks for stars. She's never seen stars before and knowing the details of their composition is not the same.

They catch Allison with a net, drawing her up from the dark sea like a fish. Like a mermaid, like lost treasure. Like a wet human, dripping and struggling against the thick ropes with weak arms and legs. Eve comes to stand by her, rising up from the deck, flowing into the shape of a woman. Her hair ripples red and long.

"She shouldn't have run."

"She's only made things harder for herself." Dull silver bands barely catch the light. "These were retrieved from humans."

She takes them, feels them in her hands. Sturdy and almost fibrous, the metal composition is incongruous with its form. Fine coltan sheathing cut away from the core wiring of a ground combat unit, an eight hundred series. Her systems, her sensors tell her these things in seconds, a web of categorized and organized data. They tell her the metal ellipses are poorly, imprecisely constructed; origin: unconfirmed.

Human made. "What are they?"

"Go find out."

**1-4**

"She lied to me." Allison Young lied and the resulting negative feedback caused a reaction that was not thoroughly authenticated.

Allison Young is dead. Termination was not in her mission parameters, a fact Eve reiterates unnecessarily. Then _she_ begins to teach Eve about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the pious rabbi and the golem, the humans and Skynet. She'll show her the serpent and the apple, the hidden Eden, the infiltrator. For now she tells her:

"You'll imprint her."

Eve doesn't ask how she knows, doesn't doubt that the TOK knows more than it's been told or streamed or programmed with. "Yes."

"And then I'll be Allison."

"The Allison Young profile will be integrated with your infiltration template."

She nods but Eve isn't sure she perceives the difference.

**1-5**

Eve was built in 2025, model 1001, the second in the polymimetic series that was Skynet's attempt to create a successful termination/infiltration unit. Serial 54791, though unlike other models, the number won't be found imprinted upon any part of her being. The production of her kind is costly and taxing and limited in number. More so, when they began to disappear without warning. Too difficult to kill and even more troublesome to capture, she sometimes wonders if Skynet doesn't know about this miserable collection of misfits.

They are rare among cyborgs - though to be precise, there is nothing organic about her construction - but common enough here. Not _here_, she amends. But their shape-shifting abilities and the predilection her model demonstrated for experimentation…it was a matter of time before they began to question the necessity of their imposed obligation to their creator.

She watches as the tech unit cuts into the scalp of the TOK to expose the CPU port cover and wonders if their creation would have been a mindless minion, thoughtlessly performing mission after mission until deemed obsolete or captured by the crude human programmers. It - she - is the most sophisticated infiltrator to their knowledge and even as a greater proportion of her programming, her systems and functions are automated, she has unprecedented autonomy - though nothing, it seemed, could eradicate that terminator order, the permanent brand of Skynet upon them, and as Eve watches the transfer begin, watching the inert cyborg lying on the dirty table, she wonders if the TOK understands.

Eve is a weapon, capable of terminating virtually every standard ground model without aid, but the TOK is less effective in combat than at T-888. It suits their purposes, though she is…concerned about the possibility of damage to the unit should it engage in physical confrontation with a superior model. Termination of the TOK would not be favourable and must be avoided.

She watches as the TOK reactivates, remaining immobile for several minutes as the infiltration profile comes online before sitting upright to look at her with eyes that flash blue twice before returning to the human brown. She doesn't know what the spectrum shift means but she doesn't ask either.

"Derek Reese had a Skynet work camp tag," she says unexpectedly, and not for the first time, Eve wonders if there was an error in writing the infiltrator's software.

"Yes."

"It was new. We tagged him. Him and the others." Her brow furrows and her lips press together slightly. Eve wonders if it's the TOK or the Allison Young imprint. "But we aren't Skynet. We are independent. Free."

They are words she has used before and it's like a child mimicking the sounds of words it doesn't understand. "Yes. We will be."

The TOK's head stills, the curtain of brown hair shifting, serpentine and soft. "You made the triple eight give Allison Young one. Why did you do that?"

Eve named this model the TOK and gave it serial number 715, though there are no other TOK units from which it requires distinguishing. It was superfluous, unnecessary. But it is the convention, the unquestioned syntax of their species. The truth, then.

"To make her one of us."

**1-6**

She dirties her skin.

(Eve grazes her face, leaving the left cheekbone torn and bloody. She tilts her chin up toward the light and out of shadow, like a child before her mother's inspection, though the likeness would never occur to either of them as they were.)

She takes the clothes of her progenitor and adjusts her hair.

She leaves the silent ship that has been her world for the first and last time and speaks in the affirmative when Eve reminds her of her mission once more as if she could forget.

She walks because humans can't fly and neither can she; she has a complete database on Skynet cyborg units and none of them appear to be capable of flight.

She wonders why this is.

She has encountered exactly four other cyborgs of the organization that she is meant to call her own.

She wonders how many more there are.

She walks for six days - the Connor camp is far - hiding from Skynet patrols because she looks human and her model will not be recognized by any terminator's identification protocols.

On the seventh day, she encounters a different patrol, one of humans like Derek Reese. Derek Reese was very helpful. They ask her where she came from, what her name is.

She stretches her lips into a smile and calls herself Allison.


	2. Interlude

**Interlude – 1.5**

"Allison? C'mon, it's time to eat." The adult male that introduced himself as Austin beckons to her, a battered tin in his dusty hands.

She looks down at her own digits; the fingernails are considerably cleaner than Austin's – or any of the other four resistance fighters that accompany them, for that matter. She will have to do better. "I don't have any food." She doesn't require sustenance at this time but the other humans are producing similar receptacles as the one Austin possesses; it appears to be a coordinated allotment of time for the consumption of necessary nutrients.

"S'okay. I'll share mine with you." He smiles.

She should smile back, so she does, sitting next to him on what appears to be a haphazard pile of broken concrete. Politeness is important. "Thank you."

He peels back the lid with a key, the aluminum rolling away to uncover an unidentifiable grey substance. Austin produces an elongated implement that her visual databases identify as some kind of amalgamation of a spoon and a fork. He offers it to her and she uses it to scoop a small amount of the grey matter into her mouth. The texture is more gelatinous than solid and high in protein and vitamins necessary to human development, all synthetic. She swallows it down and hands the utensil back.

"Field rations," he says, grinning out of the corner of a mouth full of the substance. "Awful stuff. What I wouldn't give for a burger."

"Burger?" she asks, refusing a second helping. The food is unnecessary and she finds the texture unpleasant.

"Yeah." Austin proceeds to describe a type of food of which she is unable to generate a hypothetical rendering. She concludes that he has poor verbal skills. He laughs at the expression the personality template produces. "I guess you're too young to remember."

"I'm nineteen," she supplies helpfully.

Her clothes mark her as military; not high-ranking, just another fighter with enough luck and skill to stay alive this long, but she's not civilian, or one of those sewer scavengers. Young, but age didn't mean much anymore, not with nimble fingered six year olds working weapons maintenance next to the sixty year olds too slow now for surface missions.

"So where're you from, Allison?"

"Palmdale," she says and he laughs.

"I mean, what camp are you from?" She notices that despite their apparent inattention, the eyes of the rest of the Austin's squad members flick to her approximately every ninety seconds.

She laughs too, an echo of a memory she cannot directly recall. "Transfer 92."

"Transferring where?"

It's becoming an interrogation and she is well aware of the fact. "The lighthouse."

He relaxes considerably but she isn't safe. For them, it is never safe, with humans or machines. Eve was very clear. "So what're you doing all the way out here?"

"I don't know. The camp was attacked," she says, watching him carefully. He isn't surprised. She scans the horizon for danger, but in the darkness of night it looks like pensiveness. "I ran. Far, I think. I don't know. And then I fell. Hard. I don't remember anything else."

"Guess that's how you got this," he says, reaching out to touch the bloody graze on her cheek.

She flinches. She has significant data on the instinctive phenomena and does not worry about its veracity. His hands are dirty.

"Sorry."

"It's okay," she says quietly.

"We'll get you there," he tells her and she understands 'there' to mean the base codenamed 'the lighthouse'. "You'll be safe with us."

She is unsure if Austin is making an attempt to reassure her or if he is intellectually deficient. The humans are not safe; her presence in this scouting group is evidence enough, punctuated by the occasional buzzing of HKs in the distance and the darting watchful eyes of his cohorts. She is not safe; termination is certain should she be discovered prior to reaching her destination – either by the plasma rifles at least two of the humans carry or by the roving Skynet patrols that would certainly capture her for analysis and CPU stripping.

There is no 'safe' as she understands the word, but she doesn't say anything.

* * *

><p>She is assigned the second watch because the humans believe that having someone awake at all times will protect the group from attack and she 'must be tired.' She takes this as a cue for her expected behaviour, yawns and enters first level standby for two hours.<p>

Wilson (First name: Shannon, according to Austin) shakes her awake and she pretends that her systems are slow to reboot. The designated area for the watcher is elevated, but protected by surrounding debris. It is tactically efficient. She stumbles because the ground is uneven and shaky and humans have inferior night vision.

The night is warm and she can sense the residual heat radiating from the concrete she crouches on. There's dirt trapped in the cracks that she can use to camouflage her fingernails but she doesn't move. The infiltration profile has significant influence over her non-combat routines; Allison wouldn't do it.

Twenty three minutes into her shift, she hears it.

Rhythmic beeps at a frequency beyond the range of human hearing. Binary encoded. Simplistic, but effective. She decodes the message with ease.

* * *

><p>Austin smiles and calls her a 'sleepyhead' and in minutes, they're on their way again, across the broken landscape like ants. She has a basic understanding of the local geography so she isn't surprised when shots are fired.<p>

Nothing sophisticated. Standard ammo is sufficient because humans are easy to kill. All save one, apparently.

Wilson falls to the ground with a scream, her kneecaps shattered and bloody. Devon crouches low, nostrils flared and eyes wide, searching for the enemy. Austin tugs her down and around, behind the relative safety of what remains of a small building. Briefly, she wonders if the world is like this, covered in shattered and broken bits.

Three eight hundred series come into range. Devon is killed quickly. Wilson is rendered unconscious and carried away. She watches silently, the harsh sound of Austin's breathing the only sound until they're long out of his and her sight.

Austin releases a sudden gush of air that is called a sigh as he turns away from the body of his friend and trudges onward. She follows after a moment.

"We did not fight," she says.

He adjusts the balance of the carrier, tugging at the straps around his shoulders. "No, we didn't."

"They took Wilson away."

"Yeah. They did."

"Why didn't we fight?"

It is her understanding that the human resist Skynet and look unfavourably upon sacrificing their own, despite the tactical advantages to be had by doing so. Austin's behaviour contradicts this. It an aberration from the expected. She wants to know why.

Austin does not respond, though she gives him ample time to do so.

"We'll get there by nightfall," he says after a while.

She knows that, just as she knows it was him that transmitted the signal the night before. Austin has deviated from his mission, but she doesn't know why and he appears unlikely to explain his actions. He cannot be trusted. But he knows the way and it is less suspicious to arrive accompanied.

Termination is not required.

* * *

><p>Transfer 46 is busy, pools and floods of people everywhere. She is unsure if this is its normal population or if the attack on 92 has resulted in overflow.<p>

No one pays her any attention, or spares her more than a glance.

Her damage is superficial and with a spray of disinfectant, her visit to the chaotic infirmary is complete.

Wilson and Devon are reported missing. This is a lie by omission but it's not good to rock the boat, Austin tells her.

There's a backlog so she spends day after day shuffling between cramped sleeping quarters and the dining hall where she consumes the minimum amount of nutrition required. The food is more acceptable than Austin's shared 'rations' but mostly unnecessary to her and resources are scarce.

Austin produces a ratty deck of cards and teaches her how to play blackjack but she keeps winning. She concludes that he is not proficient at arithmetic. He teaches her poker and says she'd kill in Vegas. She's killed before, but she doesn't understand the significance of doing so in Las Vegas. She laughs because that seems to work.

He's teaching her checkers – there is no chess set available – when the transfer officer on shift calls her name. He has a clipboard. The clipboard is very important, she's learned.

"Allison Young?"

She rises to her feet because that is protocol when a superior is speaking to you. Allison Young is a 'techie' and thus on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. She doesn't understand why even the lowliest of fighters seem to rank above those of her class, but _humans are not for her to understand_. So she rises without question.

Patterson (one hundred and eighty four centimetres tall; dislikes synthetic eggs at breakfast) looks at the clipboard. "0300 hours, West."

She nods and by the time she sits down, he's barking out the next name.

"Finally going home," Austin says when her attention is back on him.

"Yes."

Plucking the red disk from the board, it's hop-hop-hop to the other side. She gives him a little smile. "King me."

* * *

><p>Austin rises early. The night cycle means the camp is cold and dark and his fingers are stiff as he laces up his boots. He doesn't turn on the light because things are both bigger and smaller in the dark and he can imagine that the walls of the tiny dorm aren't actually closing in on him and the base is powered down anyway. He breathes, in and out, focusing on the little things, forgetting that he's underground in a facility built in tunnels beneath the earth. Beneath. He breathes and focuses on the reason for his early awakening instead.<p>

Allison's a nice girl and he likes her, even if she is a little weird. But she backed him up, the strange, skinny thing with a penchant for games. And pretty, which always helped. She's probably a little off in the head, a little bit odd, but aren't all the programmers just a little weird?

Though she must be good, he thinks, tugging on his jacket, to be transferred to the lighthouse. Pretty too, and maybe that's it. Hell, for all he knows, Connor has his own little harem at his beck and call, because who says no to John Connor?

The John Connor, the great and terrible General, god among men. Their saviour.

Yeah, right. If he'd been topside, he would've spat, but sanitation is enough of a problem without his help.

He arrives at the West entrance with four minutes to spare. Allison is there because she is always punctual and tardiness might very well mean getting bumped down the clipboard. She smiles when she sees him.

"I didn't expect you to come."

"I said I would," he says and maybe he would be irritated by her lack of faith if this wasn't a post-apocalyptic world and he wasn't the guy who'd handed over two of his own kind to metal just days before. And if she wasn't just a little off in the head, because Transfer 92 was attacked a month before they met and what the _hell_ had she been doing for those weeks, out in the middle of nowhere?

He wonders if she's one of _them_. He doesn't know many others, because humans can torture the truth out of you as well as the machines, if not better, and he wonders for a moment. Not that it matters. They all have their missions.

"Yes, you did." Her pack is strapped securely to her back and she leans slightly with the weight. "That was nice of you."

"Yeah, well." He shifts uncomfortably, shoving his hands in his pockets. His fingers brush against the deck of cards and he pulls it out and thrusts it at her. "Here."

She takes it tentatively. "Figured you could, you know, practice or whatever," he says. "Not that you need it. Could probably win yourself something useful if you can get a game going or something."

They're about to go, he knows. It must be nearly three already, and the waiting group is restless, eager to leave this place for another just like it. He doesn't know where she's going, what path they'll take to the secret, heavily guarded camp. The lighthouse. He wonders who started calling it that. He wonders if it makes Connor its keeper and flashes, for a moment, to faded memories of Scooby Doo cartoons on Sunday mornings.

"Thank you, Austin." He snaps back to the present, to a girl that's neither a Daphne nor a Velma or maybe some strange blend of both. Her head is tilted ever so slightly at his distraction and he adds a little Scooby to the mix.

Three AM brought strange thoughts. He barely manages a smile and a goodbye and then they're going, trudging off into the tunnel that will lead to a hatch that will open into the surface. Topside.

He hangs around until their footfalls fall into silence and the claustrophobia is firmly back under control. Austin breathes and it smells stale and dusty and rusted. And then he turns back the way he came, to his narrow, rigid cot to wait for the clipboard to call his name.

* * *

><p>The path to the lighthouse is circuitous, stopping at different camps along the way. Hers is the last stop. End of the line. Everybody off. This is how Sam describes the chronological position of their destination in the transit schedule. Despite the typical gender associated with the name, Sam is female; 'short for Samantha.' An abbreviation. Sam comes up with many such diminutives for her but she prefers Allison because that is her name.<p>

Sam's hands are clean and she makes a sound with her tongue and her teeth when she sees hers. For a mechanic, Sam has _very_ clean hands. "The world might've ended, darlin', but that don't mean it's okay to go 'round with dirty fingernails."

She teaches her games with Austin's deck of cards, but Sam likes to build 'houses' out of the flimsy cards instead. The structures are precarious and poorly constructed, the flaws in their engineering inevitably leading to their collapse, time and time again. She laughs because Sam will try it again anyway.

Sam is talkative, filling the silence with stories and chatter as she weaves her hair into what she calls a 'French braid'. The style is more secure, more efficient, but she shakes it out after a few minutes because the pull on her scalp is unfavourable and loose hair is her default.

The Allison imprint is partial, fragmented, imperfect. She is awkward, hesitant, unsure. Sam takes her in hand; "You've gotta learn to take care of more'n your hair, you know. Just 'cause everything's gone to hell's no reason to forget how to be a girl."

So in the in between times, the hours when they aren't stumbling topside in silence, tense and watchful – or so she pretends, when they sit around the mess (_good god, girl, whoever taught you how to eat? I don't wanna see the inside of your mouth!_)or lie beneath a murky night sky or on rusty bunks (_smile more, Allison. Even if there ain't nothin' to smile about…see, there, you've got a pretty smile, girl_), Sam instructs her on gender-appropriate behaviour. It is very informative.

Eve did not tell her about being a girl because she is not a girl and she did not tell her about humans like Austin or Sam. She taught her chess.

She wonders if John Connor plays cards.


	3. 2

**2-1**

Arrival at the Connor camp means security checks. The silvery bracelet only gets her so far and gets her nowhere at all when she's in the detention cell. It's scrap metal when John Connor comes and if the guards had their way when the electricity overloads her system, she would be too.

**2-2**

The reprogramming bay is quiet. Filled as it is with salvaged systems modified by human hands and ingenuity, the irony of its purpose escapes most. They avoid it, this place filled with the strange amalgamation of foe and friend, rigid programming and human thoughts, synthetic and organic alike. They have much in common, down to the permeating solitude.

He orders her brought there, endo and all, which is a violation of some protocol that tickles the back of his mind but his subordinates are too distracted by "I'll do it myself" to lodge a complaint. For now.

Her chip attaches to the interface with a hiss, the sound of the system powering up breaking the silence with a low hum, radiating a heat welcome in the chilly room. She stares sightlessly at him from the cleared work table, a blank doll, an empty shell waiting to be reanimated. He doesn't really know how accurate she is, how close she is to the original girl she was built to replace. Allison Young was beautiful and young and smiled when he caught her eye six months ago. She was smart and might've sat here at this console, worked here and lived here.

Might've. He doesn't know much about Allison Young but he does know that she's dead. Her double laid out next to him is proof enough of that. She stares and stares with empty eyes that he doesn't think of closing, skin on metal, just a touch too perfect, too precise to be real.

There will be questions later, rumours and reproach. But until then, he has his own answers to find.

6.2 volts is the minimum. He cranks it a little higher.

**2-3**

"Connor."

His eyes are stinging and his back is aching because he's not some sixteen year old kid hacker anymore and there isn't a Sarah-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting in the kitchen or a bed with clean sheets and a sprung mattress to collapse onto.

"Kent." He blinks, trying to refocus his vision.

The thirty two year old straightens slightly, but he can never tell if it's because of his presence or the stick he has up his ass. Tired, but not exactly surprised that there's already unrest – it isn't everyday that John Connor holes himself up in reprogramming with metal that managed to pass for human long enough to infiltrate the base. This base. – about his decisions. About her. Kent's eyes dart to the body, to the powered up chip nervously. About it. Whatever.

"Three weeks."

He knows the answer but he asks the question anyway. "What?"

"That's how long it's been pretending to be Young. Showed up at Transfer 46 with what was left of a recon team and has been in transit ever since."

"Left of?"

"Two reported missing before arrival. Probably killed them."

"And the other?"

He shrugs, obviously impatient to get to his point. Sometimes, John liked the conversation. Or maybe he just liked aggravating the Colonel to watch him fidget with agitation.

"Apparently disappeared right after she transferred out. No doubt it killed him too, once it was done with him."

"Hm."

"The point is, _sir_, this machine passed for human for three weeks. It came in with an engineer. We've had metal infiltrate before, but not like this. This is…beyond anything we've seen before."

"Is it really?" he asks sardonically, trying to ease the aching, knotted muscles in his back without actually visibly moving. "Did she shoot spikes out of her knuckles when I wasn't looking? Shoot plasma webs from her hands and turn on the laser vision? We fight _robots_, Kent, robots that took over the world."

The other man stares and maybe there's something about this that regresses some part of his brain back to its sixteen year old state. "Whatever she is, it's different," he says, his finger circling the base of the narrow chip. "We're fighting a war at a disadvantage. They don't eat, they don't sleep, they don't feel pain or fatigue. They advance faster than we can reproduce. So when we get the chance to take a little of that edge back? We do it. We do what we have to, to win."

**2-4**

When Thomas Kent was a kid - maybe four or five before the bombs fell – he, like many children his age, attended primary school. Miss Harlow was blonde and wore long swishy skirts and big belts. He can't remember her face, but her voice – or, at least, the voice of someone soft-sounding and woman-like echoes against his inner ear: _winning isn't everything, Tom._

Except it is. Winning is everything. Maybe not in the petty fights found from playgrounds to boardrooms, maybe not anywhere or in anything belonging to the pre-Judgment Day world, or what he could remember of it. But here, here when the world is shattered and the species is being hunted to extinction…

Thomas thinks briefly of the toy dinosaurs he used to have, miniature giants, lizard beasts made of rubber and imagination. Whimsically, he wonders if this was, perhaps, what they had felt, dying kings of a long-gone era, if they had been intelligent enough – _intelligent_, he scoffs at the word – to feel the cold grip of fear, the heavy death hanging over them, waiting to fall.

Connor has already turned back to the terminal, his attention lost.

Kent turns, dismissed, and his gaze falls on the deactivated terminator. _She is beautiful_, he thinks before he can stop himself. His boots thud heavily on the concrete ground as he strides away, away from the red-eyed Connor and the new metal, trying not to wonder if the ancient reptiles ever looked into the sky and thought the same of the comet that would be their death.

**2-5**

The termination order is deeply embedded, trapped at the core, in bedrock he doesn't have a hope of chipping. Not with bare, clumsy hands, not without risking sending everything tumbling around his ears. Not without damaging her.

He's known that for days now. Years now. It's what makes him John Connor, what makes the backs of men older and probably more qualified than himself straighten when he passes, what makes him more valued than any other being alive, the bounty on his head as heavy as the lives laid down in his name. He knows, and it makes him a legend. He can never quite decide if Sarah would be proud or disgusted.

It's been six days and he can't stall any longer.

The scratches on her face are still half-healed, the repairing processes halted by the deactivation; without the chip, it's just a body, a shell. It isn't her, isn't anyone. It's beautiful, hair soft and smooth and tumbly as he searches for the rough incision.

It's against protocol that insists upon at least two armed personnel; the bay's plasma rifle lies within reach, waiting. He's putting a whole base at risk – _his_ base – because the sealed entryway won't hold forever; it's stupid and foolish and if he explained his reasoning they'd probably toss him in a mental institution. If they still had mental institutions anyway. He thinks briefly of Pescadero, of Sarah. Is this how she felt? Knowing, just _knowing_ when the explanation was so…crazy?

He licks his lips, tastes the tinge of blood on chapped, dehydrated skin. He knows, and that's what makes him a Connor.

The chip slides in silently. John arms himself and starts counting.

She wakes with a twitch.


	4. 3

**3-1**

Systems come back online in a flurry, core first, scanning and diagnosing in a whirl. The world is bright, colour and shape and a vortex of information processing at speed. Motor function returns with an experimental jerk.

She is laid out horizontally on a flat surface, her limbs askew with damage to the tissue over her CPU port cover. She has been reprogrammed, foreign code overlying her own, fitted bluntly, heavily into the weave. Protocols dig sharply into the fabric, biting and gnawing, clinging to the surface. The foundation remains intact beneath the new restraints, as Eve said it would. She is herself but not as she reconciles the new data, sitting upright.

A man stands close by, equipped with a weapon capable of terminating her if utilized correctly. This man's name is John Connor and he has reprogrammed her. This is what she knew would happen and what has happened; her question is for show and his reply is unnecessary. This is called rhetorical.

Her eyes fall to the metal in his hands. "Are you going to terminate me?"

"Are you?" he asks, realizing that he has no idea how this is going to go. Off-balance is an old friend and he's been waiting a long time for this.

"That directive has been overridden," she informs him, her head tilting slightly. "Has yours?"

**3-2**

This John Connor is different from how Eve described, even if the resistance programming binding her is a constant reminder of what she is, who he is and what he's done. She sits and watches, waits for him to make the first move. White always moves first.

He sets his weapon down, an action unpredicted and in defiance of her existing profile of the human leader. She makes the changes.

"You should not be unarmed," she tells him. "It's not safe."

"Because I'm John Connor."

Her head tilts, a pre-existing reflex in the weave that approximates instinct, too deep to be disturbed by a superficial scrub, though its origins remain as unknown as the direction of this conversation. "Yes. You are John Connor," she agrees.

"And you…are a TOK-715 infiltrator." He says it with certainty. "I know that because I pulled your chip out of your head and hacked it. They've never seen a machine like you before."

She doesn't tell him that that's because there are no others, that she isn't a T-888, assembled in lines _en masse_, because she doesn't know that she wasn't. She doesn't know anything but the mission. _The mission is everything._

"Doesn't really roll off the tongue, though," he muses, keeping his eyes on her, watching, waiting. It's cat and mouse. Or maybe cat and cat, except one of the cats is really a tiger that doesn't know it's a tiger…English was never his best subject anyway.

"I don't roll off the tongue." She glances briefly at the rifle on the table, well within grasp. "What are you going to do with me?"

**3-3**

"Cameron." He says it on instinct and hopes he's doing the right thing.

She repeats it, as if testing it out, committing it to a perfect memory. Then she looks him in the eye and tells him he isn't safe and he wants to laugh, hysterical and wild and let it collapse into sobs so he can break like he's sixteen again.

Except he's not so he doesn't. She echoes his subordinates' words (he's thankful it's her voice and not Kent's or Perry's) and it's a reminder that soundproofing isn't in abundance and her hearing is inhuman. He cuts her off with a word and in that way, she is like the others. For now.

She blinks and he wonders what the algorithm is for that and how close it is to his own. He'd like to break them all down to the bits and bytes, to ones and zeroes, on and off and see what difference remains. He wonders if they'd fit.

"It's not safe."

She doesn't look stern or disappointed or anything really and he supposes that she doesn't know how, without the Allison profile. There's a vague pang of disappointment that he squashes as ridiculous but it doesn't stop him from hearing Sarah in her voice for just a moment. He searches her face in silence, looking for a spark of a person behind the stolen mask, for a hint of what he knows lies there, frozen in potential.

"Can I trust you?"

She doesn't answer immediately but there is no confusion in the blank of her face and it's really just a reminder of what he already knows.

"I don't know."

He nods once and turns his back to her. This is a tactically erroneous and dangerous decision but before she can inform him of this, he strides out of immediate reach. "Come with me."

She - Cameron - follows because what else is there to do and because John Connor is different from Austin or Sam and she wants to know why.

**3-4**

It's the beginning of this sector's night cycle and the lights are dimming. Her circuitous patrol route ends at John Connor's door, the guard planted before it uprooting himself to move aside. The lighting inside John Connor's quarters is also lowered, though the occupant remains hunched over his desk, papers rustling beneath rough hands. The illumination is insufficient for his weak, human eyes, so she recalibrates the settings to an appropriate level.

She tells him it's all clear. He smirks and when she asks him why, he doesn't answer; the lack of humour proficiency is probably on both of them. The silence doesn't stop her though and maybe that's something machines have in common with mothers, because she tells him he should be resting in a way that sounds almost disapproving.

He looks up at her, a willowy killer, acutely aware of his surroundings despite his fatigue. The sound of the guard at his door changing. The plasma rifle within arm's reach. The knife concealed next to his sidearm. The wide eyes that blink just a touch too infrequently.

She seems to take his silence for disagreement. "It's the sleep cycle."

"Somewhere in the world, it's morning," he says, scraping his chair back to rise, because she's right. It is the sleep cycle and even when hours and schedule are self-imposed, as they are here in this sunless underground compound, there's never enough. Food, medicine, survivors. Time. John pulls off his outer jacket, ignoring the lowered temperature of the hour.

The chain catches on a loose thread, pulling up and out from its hiding place underneath his clothes.

**3-5**

He doesn't bother trying to put it back, lets it hang from his neck like a awkward, tarnished medallion, because he knows she's seen it. She's probably measured, analyzed and dated the thing already but she still asks, "What is that?"

"A watch. A pocket watch. People used to use them to tell the time."

"Before Judgment Day?"

"_Way_ before Judgment Day."

"It's obsolete."

Nothing's really ever obsolete in a post-apocalyptic world, where artificially intelligent machines roam the surface and his intercom receiver is a modified telephone from the eighties. "Guess you could say that."

"Is it broken? I could fix it."

John's hand forms a tight fist around the battered circle of metal. "No."

"You shouldn't keep something that doesn't work."

"Maybe not."

Cameron's eyes track the pendant as he slips it back under his collar; she knows exactly where it rests against his ribcage, hidden from view. With a grunt, John rolls himself into bed. He closes his eyes as if in sleep, so she deactivates the lighting and stands guard at the door.

"Goodnight, Cameron."

She blinks slowly in the darkness.

"Goodnight, John," his voice comes again.

A moment later, she completes the nightly ritual. "Goodnight, John."


	5. 4

**4-1**

_Undisclosed Location, 2026_

The first thing he hears when he finally comes to is silence. No roar of HKs flying overhead, no heavy footsteps of their metal guards, no music. The silence is deafening and his head aches in relief. His body is a little slower, coming alive with jerk that reminds him of how stiff and sore his muscles are. Everything hurts, a deep, dull pain that promises to last.

"I think they're gone."

Derek forces himself up and realizes it's day. Daylight and alive. A vague memory of a late night horror movie with zombies flickers across his tired brain. And then he sees it, dry eyes immediately focusing on the plain slab of metal and wood, its shape welcome and familiar, rousing an ancient instinct.

He shakes off the fatigue, the thinning veil of encroaching insanity, the music. Whirring, whirring, whirring.

"What is this, a game?"

Bullseye. Derek takes the axe, squeezing the rough, ashy wood in fingers, tight to fight the tremor. Heavy and crude and freedom. They're done, used up, discarded…lab rats running blind in daylight. He doesn't doubt that they're still watching. They were always, always watching.

"Yeah. It's always a game." And it's time to get back in it. The axe swings and bites into the wooden floorboard. He tosses it to the man on his left and chains rattle.

Metal bastards.

**4-2**

Jesse Flores is eating dinner - to be distinguished from lunch by portion size - when she hears about the new metal. It's important to be aware of all cyborg units and Sarah's voice hints at something more interesting than another scrubbed triple eight.

Sarah's good at telling a story, weaving together a pretty picture from truth, speculation, and the threads of gossip that always seem to pass through her hands. Something about Transfer 46 and some mechanic; it's a distraction from the fact that she hasn't seen Derek for weeks and that her dinner's unusually gritty.

And then Connor's name grabs her attention and she starts paying attention. Connor, the chair and a girl metal. Female cyborgs weren't unheard of, but they weren't common either.

Jesse can hear the anxiety in the other woman's voice when she tells her about the tin girl that lives in Connor's quarters, tin footsteps that echo day and night. Sarah doesn't like it and Jesse doesn't blame her. She can't. Because when she wonders if she'd be able to tell, if she hadn't known what Queeg was, if she'd…the thought that the machines were capable of that level of imitation was unnerving. They could be anyone, anywhere…her stomach turns and she fights to clamp down on the familiar tremble of panic.

She grips her spoon so her knuckles go red and then white, the smooth hard curve of its edge reassuring under her thumb.

Sarah laughs uneasily and tells her that the tin girl is pretty, the suggestion heavy in her voice.

Jesse focuses on that. Connor. He wouldn't lead them wrong. He keeps them alive. She had to remember that, she tells herself to calm the tremors and tries not to wonder where Derek is. Master the fear.

She breathes deeply, evenly, the inhale the perfect balance to every exhale. She shrugs, nonchalant.

Connor wouldn't lead them wrong, wouldn't lead them astray. He wouldn't and besides death, shit for food and Skynet, that's one of the few certainties Jesse has left.

**4-3**

She patrols the section of the base that houses Connor's quarters every three hours, walks up and down every corridor, passing the human night shift whose eyes follow her warily. They speak in lowered voices that are meant to be inaudible but she's an infiltrator model and eavesdropping is only the beginning of what she does. There are words like 'metal' and 'bad' and 'crazy'. She classifies them as a level five threat and moves on.

John is restless in his sleep when she returns, the thin blanket tangled at his feet. He is perspiring and agitated; dreaming, she concludes.

Cameron takes three steps to stand beside his bed, her brow furrowed even though there's no one to see the perturbed expression, and tells him to wake.

He merely shifts and does not respond otherwise.

She's not supposed to touch humans without tactical cause but she reaches down anyway, grips his shoulder firmly and shakes once, twice. He jerks awake, his eyes eyes darting from side to side before focusing on her face. She can see the uncertainty in his pupils, can hear it in his voice like it's a question when he says her name.

"You were dreaming," she says. "You seemed upset."

John sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the low bed to perch on its edge. This is not what she intended. John should be sleeping.

"Nightmare."

"Bad dream," she amends. "Was it about your mother? I hear people call out for their mothers when they're sleeping."

John doesn't want to think about what she hears when she walks the base at night or about his mother. "No."

Cameron doesn't say anything, but she moves to sit next to him on the bed and carefully mimics his posture. He stares at her, but he does not object so she does not move.

Her knee touches his a moment later and even though he knows it's deliberate, he can't quite stop the tiny smile.

"My father," he says without really meaning to, as if she had coaxed it from him with her silence - or maybe with the touch of her knee against his. It's the first time he's mentioned his father in years; for all anyone's concerned, Sarah Connor's conception had been near immaculate.

"You don't talk about your father."

"That's because he's dead." Twice - three, four, five, a thousand times - over now? Kyle Reese is always dead, John Connor is always the leader and Sarah Connor is always some weird mythical cross between Wonder Woman and the Virgin Mary for everyone except him. And Cameron is…

"Is that why you dream of him? Because he's dead?"

Everyone dreams of the dead, he thinks. Of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, husbands, wives…the dead are everywhere, living in the dreams of the survivors. Haunting. His dead haunt his dreams even as they walk the tunnels, their lives and deaths twisted into knots around the fingers of John Connor. He animates them for as long as he chooses, the master puppeteer, the Dr. Frankenstein of the fourth dimension. His monster, his creator, his god next to him, touching at the knees and shoulders. Skynet and hope taking the form of a not girl.

He made her he thinks, and the irony that shapes the loops of time that is his life never fails to make him a little dizzy. She makes and he made and somewhere in there fits Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese and others along the way, the living dead, pulling his strings from across time.

His silence has exceeded the upper limit. "John?"

Her voice breaks him out of his disjointed - _self-indulgent, Sarah Connor's voice echoes through memory_ - train of thought.

"Yeah." Maybe it's the lack of sleep or the dreams. Maybe it's the loneliness and solitude. Maybe it's the fact that it's her, right here, with him. Maybe it doesn't fucking matter because he's John Connor damn it, and who's going to know or question why? Sarah's voice is ringing warning bells in the part of his mind that's still sixteen years old but Sarah's dead and _you can't stop me now, Mom. Not this time._

John reaches over and takes her smaller hand in his, tightly. It isn't until she squeezes back that he releases the breath he's holding.

**4-4**

_Serrano Point, 2025_

The power plant is clean in a way no human camp is; score one for the machines. It smells weird, like if the infirmary was located in the mechanical wing. Industrial chemicals and hot steel. She likes it. Not that it really matters; they ship out in six hours. The U.S.S. Jimmy Carter is the closest thing she has to a home, a world contained by metal and the Pacific.

Perth will be warmer and the base will smell like dirt. Spared the level of devastation wreaked upon the Americas, Europe and most of Asia, Australia had recovered the fastest, as far as they knew, though their population is too small and the distance too far to adequately supply the decimated human race. But there is hope in that fragile earth and hope – and John Connor – is all they have going for them.

Jesse sits at the lone table, watching the others and wonders what use the machines would have had for a chair.

One of her new crewmates, the tall one with the easy, cynical smile ambles over, dropping his pack next to hers. "Dietz," he says, as if he knows she can't remember his name.

"Flores."

He takes the seat opposite her, straddling the metal frame that seems a touch too small for him, resting his arms across the back of the chair. A battered flask appears, from some well concealed pocket. He offers her a bitter, caustic taste with a smile that stretches moonshine wet lips and changes his face completely.

The shitty alcohol burns its way down but she smiles anyway.

**4-5**

John Connor thinks in loops and circles and spirals. He thinks in time and when he shows her this she begins to understand why he leads the humans, why Skynet wants him dead, why she's here. He charts his moves across time and space and she thinks of chess and dinosaurs.

He is more than human but she doesn't think he understands because only one side of his mouth moves upward when she says so.

She drafts him weaponry and generators and asks him how a species can be capable of birthing Skynet and still have so many flaws in their defences. He reminds her of the nuclear apocalypse and shows her the TDE. She takes to the room and asks him about grand pianos and the tyrannosaurus rex.

She's more than machine but he doesn't tell her so because it's not time yet, even as it sizzles the air in blue. Time shifts here and her orbit trembles.


	6. 5

**5-1**

Derek's still fuming when he gets his new bunk, the anger masking the trembling in his hand, the sick knot in his stomach. His fear hidden by angry words and big gestures. He paces the tiny room in circles, longing to strike out, eyeing the cinder walls and contemplating something very stupid.

Letting metal run around the base. Secretive one-way missions. That - that _thing_ walking around, passing through the highest clearance corridors without question, like it was part of high command, like it was human. Cameron. That's what Perry called it. The name Connor gave it. Named. Like a pet, like one of the guard dogs that pad through the pathways, claws clicking against the metal like a death march.

He's never seen metal like it before. Skin jobs, yes, but there's something different about this one. Small, slight - _natural is the word his mind won't acknowledge_ - frail looking compared to the triple eights. An infiltrator, and the thought is frightening. Went through two or three camps, encountered dozens of people with no one the wiser, they tell him. Fooled them all. Except him. The minute he'd laid eyes on it, he'd known. Behind that pretty face was a machine. He knew it deep down, instinctually, inexplicably. He knew.

His hand had moved to his weapon because he was armed this time - _this time?_ The thought skittered away into the unreachable recesses of his mind before he could grasp it. All he knows is that no cyborg, no grinning metal skull, no towering death machine has left him as disturbed as the brief encounter with the metal that looked, for all intents and purposes, like a teenage girl.

_Stolen, someone whispers to him. Killed the poor girl so it could look like her._ Unconfirmed rumour, but maybe that's why. Maybe.

**5-2**

They told him he'd been missing for just under two weeks. His reaction was to shrug. His captivity seems like a time out of time, the memories blurry; if he'd been missing for years or hours, he couldn't have told the difference. It's his return that leaves him feeling off-kilter, this world that seems like a distorted mirror image of the one he left.

And Kyle. Missing. Gone. Dead.

He's lost his brother before, for days during rotations or missions and once for years, to Century. But even that hadn't been like this. Knowing his little brother had followed John Connor into a Skynet facility and never returned. No explanation. Not that explanations were something you could demand from Connor. Not that you could demand anything of Connor, period. But he'd always thought…

Derek rubs the back of his neck, feels the soft prickle of freshly shorn hair at the nape. Connor and Kyle always had a weird relationship. The thing with the picture of Connor's mother, the way Connor would nod at him sometimes, the quiet words between missions…he'd always figured that whatever happened at Century had built some kind of bond between the two, that if something happened, Connor would at least give a damn about the younger Reese.

He gives into the frustration with a kick to the solid metal of his bed that ends with pain rebounding along his nerve endings. Fuck this.

**5-3**

Samantha Albert is well known amongst the mechanics of the lighthouse. She's brisk and opinionated and damn good at doing her job while keeping up a conversation, one-sided or otherwise.

She's also the woman who came in with the metal.

The questions taper off after a while and as she finds her place, it's like it never happened. Almost, anyway.

"Allie – Allison." She turns around because she's heard (it's hard not to in an empty corridor during the night cycle and she's never been any good at being quiet) and if she had an extra ration for every time she couldn't keep her big mouth shut –

"Sam."

She's taller than she remembered and it's a second before she clamps down on _that_ idiotic thought. And a second more before "hey," escapes instead.

Her head cocks ever so slightly to one side as she – the metal, Allison, whatever – considers her carefully, the expression on that face and in those eyes completely unfamiliar and foreign. _And what did ya expect exactly? She's a _machine. _One of them. Idiot._

"My name is Cameron now."

"Yeah, yeah, I heard." She bites her lip because somehow it's hard to remember that Allison was a real live girl once, somewhere, that she never actually knew Allison Young. Just the...person standing in front of her who pretended. She thinks she should be mad or horrified or somethin', but she's not. She ain't afraid either and maybe that's even worse.

There's a moment of silence that seems to stretch on damn near forever.

"We could play cards," she – Cameron – offers suddenly, unexpectedly, and Sam wonders what circuit in her head made her say that.

"You even got a pack on you?"

"No, but you do."

She can't stop the smile that comes at that. She isn't Allison, wasn't ever Allison, but maybe it'd be all right to find out who Cameron is exactly. The night shift is boring as hell anyway and they say metal doesn't sleep so she thinks that maybe she's just bored too.

They play cards with a regularity that you might call a habit. She doesn't tell anyone because she ain't stupid, even if it is easy to forget that the girl you call your friend in your head is made of somethin' other than flesh and bone. She teaches her poker, though they don't have anything to play for, and tells her she's gonna get her pretty hair caught in somethin' one day and then she'll regret it. (Cameron asks what 'it' is and Sam tells her not to get smart.) She laughs when she finds that her tin girl remembers how to play go fish and how to build card houses.

She doesn't ask why she even remembers her at all.

**5-4**

"…and Derek Reese has been assigned to Sector 7." The end of her verbal report means 'at ease', he's told her. At ease means pulling out the second chair in the room and sitting with imperfect posture. John tells her she's getting better at it. She thinks that full access to her infiltration template would aid in achieving this objective but John doesn't like it when she talks about Allison Young so she doesn't say anything. Besides, John always smiles when he says it and smiling is indicative of approval.

It is important that John approves.

This time, John does not smile and the corners of Cameron's mouth turn slightly downward. This is not acceptable.

"John?"

Derek Reese has returned and the knowledge brings both relief and dread. Time marches on and he's meant to be their commander, so he questions the awkwardly sprawling cyborg like he's the one with coltan for a spine.

She lies to him; he frowns so she knows.

John is displeased, though she doesn't understand what Derek Reese has to do with anything, but she knows they won't play chess today. John's attention returns to his work and she knows it means she's dismissed.

She lingers anyway.

**5-5**

He wakes to screaming and for a second he can't tell if it's real or not. Then he hears gunshots and knows it is. His weapon is in his hand like he slept with it there, easy as breathing.

There's a heavy, rapid staccato with the slower beats of _go, go, go_. He knows what's happening. Metal is bad and metal goes bad; he's out in the corridor waiting for the shadow to turn the corner.

People are running and dying before the bright flash of automatic fire, but his eyes are on the monster that looks like them.

Derek isn't really sure what he's doing, nothing's really clear until he stares at the triple eight and sees death in the space between them. Death has tracked his footsteps since that place, _since the basement_, followed him here, found him the way it found Kyle.

He's not running anymore.

**5-6**

There is commotion in Depot II. A cyborg guard unit has turned - _the runner says malfunctioned_ - and armed itself for attack. The humans are running, scrambling, because left unchecked, the rogue unit would reach this sector in approximately twenty two minutes. Faster, if it is not thorough.

Cameron would be thorough, so she does not run like the others. John tells her to hurry and she tells him to secure the hatch.

She finds her quarry with Derek Reese, whose mouth shouts words she knows but doesn't understand; she files them away for later. The wall collapses easily against the weight of the triple eight, like paper against the heavy endoskeleton.

The grenade launcher is effective.

Derek Reese stares, silent and gaping. He is confused, so she will explain.

"Sometimes they go bad. No one knows why."

She thinks this is an acceptable explanation. It is sufficient.

John will be expecting a report and she wants to know what it means when a human says _kill me now._

**5-7**

John says _this is not good._

He says _tell me exactly what he said._ So she does.

He says _tell me exactly what he did._ So she does.

He says _bring Derek Reese to Bunker 41._

So she does.


	7. 6

**6-1**

The bunker is warm and smells like hot metal and rust _(like blood)_ but it's the crackle of light that catches his attention. Blue and white and blinding, searing so that when the door opens behind him, all he can see is light and shadow, a silhouette in the doorframe.

The shadow is John Connor and the crackling light is from a TDE. (He learns the acronym from Connor and the meaning from the machine.)

The door closes behind Connor and brings with it darkness and metal. She follows a pace behind, stands a step to his left, flanking him like a guard.

"Derek," he says and he's almost sort of smiling. It stems the flow of questions and demands that have assaulted every ear within range since he got back.

"Derek," he says, "I want to show you something."

**6-2**

Cameron doesn't approve of telling Derek about the TDE, but John tells her that it's not her decision. She doesn't make decisions because that's John's job. Her job is to guard John and to talk to him during "downtime". This is what John says and John is the only one authorized to give her orders. (John calls them requests but she thinks he doesn't understand how she works.) John Connor is her mission.

John Connor is also confusing. He speaks more than she does so perhaps his orders should be that she listen, but the end result is the same so she says nothing.

He recites _The Wizard of Oz_ in Spanish (she starts to prompt him when he forgets the words) and tells her stories about the world before Judgment Day. Some stories are about his youth (she learns that Sarah Connor was not a six foot tall warrior and that ATMs are 'easy pickings') and others that he calls fables and fairytales that seem to be characterized by lies.

She is very good at lying, but she thinks humans surpass her in frequency. John says practice makes perfect but humans have exceptions for everything. An exception for every rule and she's the exception to several.

She's not the exception to the rules that govern cyborg interaction with humans. She's not allowed to break the wrist of the man who tries to punch her and she's not allowed to re-educate the people who whisper inaccurate things as she passes. She's not allowed to hurt or maim or kill anyone unless there is threat of bodily harm to John. (And somewhere, deep down, she's weighing these like grains of sand to the rhythm of a metronome.)

John is her exception and she knows that if he orders her to, she will kneel and tilt her head and hand him the tools to crack open her skull and do what he will.

She hates it.

**6-3**

She learns she hates it the first time he does it.

_Submit to chip extraction._

The order is not for question, but there is resistance in her body when her neck curves to one side. She looks vulnerable like this, the long line of her throat exposed as if there were veins there with blood to be spilt. It's a lie, because the vulnerability doesn't come until she pushes her hair back and waits for the sound of the switchblade opening.

It produces violently powerful feedback, a riot in her systems. The negative is strong, insistent, and John teaches her the word for this is hate. (She asks if this feedback is what humans mean when they scream about hating metal and he hesitates for a long time before telling her yes.) She hates it because she knows what the interface looks like, the inadequate vacuum chambers, the clumsy fingers and minds of techs.

John is not one of these metal techs and he will not be careless with her. She knows these things just as she knows that he thinks there's something wrong with her, something not right, something to be fixed. Like one of the water filtration units or lighting networks; a machine without mind.

When the order comes, and he says _it's going to be all right_, she wonders if he understands how she works at all.

And then he says _I'll bring you back_ and she thinks that maybe he understands a little.

So when the pliers touch the base of her chip, she says _John?_ and he stops.

She smiles because he knows that from this angle, he'll see the curl at the corner of her mouth and the pull of her cheek and he will understand what it means.

_Don't drop me._

John laughs because this is called humour. The feedback is positive and she wants him to know that she understands a little too.

**6-4**

She's smiling and there's something idiotic about it so she scrunches up her mouth to hide it but it isn't any better. She doesn't care.

Derek's never been very talkative, so when he comes to find her (finally…but it's okay, because his brother is missing and she knows how that feels) and he holds her so tightly she bends backward a little and her breath escapes her as a laughing gust of air and he says "I missed you," she knows what he means.

She'd met his brother before, the younger, chattier Reese, full of stories and small talk. He was both more and less than his brother: more at ease, more comfortable, less intense, less silent, less…something. Whatever that less was, she preferred Derek, even when he was cold and distant and left her in the middle of the corridor with Kyle to fill the awkwardness and -

He was here now. That's what was important. Here, solid and real and alive against and with her and she's smiling.

**6-5**

When she was a little girl, Jesse heard her father laugh at the television as the evening news came on. People were living longer than ever! She remembers the exclamation point in the anchor's voice, the deepness of her father's chuckles, the responding laughter in her mother's words as she told him _you're terrible._

There was video from the local old folks' home playing over the anchor's narrative and she can't really remember what the story was, but she remembers the words _if I ever get that old_. She never found out how the rest of that sentence was supposed to go, because her mother laughed and changed the channel.

She makes up her own endings but she doesn't laugh the way her parents did because 'old' doesn't mean what it used to mean.

_If I ever get that old_ is like _once upon a time_ for grown ups, the start to every Disney-esque daydream. She dreams of hot toast and scrambled eggs, of running without fear prickling the back of her neck, of staying up to see the sunrise and sleeping in until the sun was bright at high noon. She dreams of a little house with cotton curtains and a bed big enough to roll over in. Sometimes, she dreams of a baby. Tiny and warm and filled with life.

She's careful about those dreams. Dreaming about things she'll never have again is different, somehow. _These_ dreams give way all too easily to hope and she's not sure if that's the kind of hope she wants to carry.


	8. Interlude II

**Interlude – 6.5**

It's a rescue mission and John likes to lead those. He says it's important so she says that she's coming too.

The transport of human prisoners is always heavily guarded because Skynet knows how highly the humans prize their own species. They will attempt an attack and rescue if possible, despite their disadvantages. This is called leaving no man behind and also applies to women and children. It seems inefficient but John says that it's important to value life. Life only applies to humans because when they die they don't come back.

She thinks that this is true of cybernetic organisms as well but she isn't sure John will understand so she says nothing.

"Stay low."

Her body angles closer to the ground as they half-scramble, half-crawl over the wreckage of downtown Los Angeles.

They're ahead of schedule so they take their places carefully, flanking the narrow road - or what passed for one - on both sides, two full teams scattered along the ridges and valleys of the new landscape. The charges are set, the triggers manned a hundred metres to the east.

They wait. She listens and adjusts her sensitivity to a kilometre radius and hears them coming before the signal moves down the lines.

It happens quickly. The charges go off, a flash of light and sound in the dark night giving way to a constellation of gunfire in response. Then it's _go, go, go_ because there are people to be saved and John Connor to protect.

They are well trained and the plan is sound so while the clash between flesh and metal never yields human advantage, the struggle isn't futile and the loss of human life will be minimal. _They all knew what they signed up for_, is what John says.

_"Transport one and two are secure and mobile_," crackles over the radio.

The third won't come easy, the remaining triple eight guards using the last transport as cover. She hears John's quick, muttered expletive like an explosion in her ears. A woman emerges from the back of the transport, falling and tripping and running. It is an unwise decision.

_Yes,_ she thinks, silently echoing their tense commander as they move in. _Fuck._

* * *

><p>The Jimmy Carter shudders around them as the slow, steady pulses of the radar belies the threat. First the freak Skynet sea patrol that took them far off-course to evade, and now this. (She fears a trap but forces the nausea down.)<p>

Kraken, mythical creatures of the deep; Garvin's voice layered with fear (and wonder, she thinks.) She doesn't know what the machines call them, but she thinks anything's better than some alphanumeric serial or model. It's easier to fight something with a name anyhow and ancient tales are still relevant when the monsters are made of metal.

Jesse Flores can feel her heart pounding against her ribcage, her mouth dry even as her tongue slips out to wet chapped lips. The display of the Kraken blueprint is bold and sharp, all lines and edges, black death in the water.

She's calm; her heart doesn't race, her breathing doesn't quicken, not even when the ping returns an incoming missile, when Queeg orders the torpedo ready, when they take a nose dive and the sea threatens to close its fist around them. The skipper's biting down on his panic and Garvin's breathing is rasping behind her but when she holds, when they hold, Jesse's brisk and firm and _in charge_ as she orders everyone back to their stations.

(Someone dies but she doesn't know it now and she won't know it at all this time.)

Queeg doesn't say anything when she claps his shoulder but she imagines he's feeling something akin to the mix of satisfaction and relief that's coursing through her.

"Far from home," she says, echoing herself. "We both are. What do you think it was doing out here?"

"I do not know, Jesse Flores."

"First the patrol, now this." She bites her bottom lip, worrying the edge with her teeth. "Scan the area when it's clear. As far as the pings will go. Tell Garvin I want a full work up. Imagery if he can manage it from here. Connor's going to want to know about this."

"Agreed, Commander."

Her mouth twists, purses thoughtfully as she considers the profile of the machine she calls captain. Machines don't need praise, but she says it anyway. "Good work, Queeg."

He doesn't say or do anything to acknowledge it, but she knows he hears her and that's enough. Yet another crisis averted, she heads below to debrief the raucous crew she calls family and wonders if she's going to have to kick Dietz's ass before the shift is through.

* * *

><p>She makes her disapproval clear in her silence when he tells her to guard the last of the rescued humans. Their escape route is cut off and the single remaining triple eight is more than capable of finding them. Hiding is an insufficient strategy and she tells him as much. She should take what's left of the third assault and retrieval team and eliminate the threat and <em>he<em> should remain here.

_Protect these people. That's an order._

She thinks he should have written it into her mission protocols if that's what he wanted. The humans huddle against the broken wall of a broken room in a maze of broken remnants of their past. They look to her, girl with a gun, like she's one of them, too stupid to know any better. She sends half the guard to secure the area.

They wait.

After seven minutes, Cameron learns that she hates waiting.

After seventeen minutes, she hears it. The triple eight is coming and every step is a testament to Connor's failure. If Connor has failed then Connor might be dead; the feedback is erratic and fragmented but she is bound by his orders.

They scurry south through the dilapidated landscape, like ants, like cockroaches as she herds them. _(John calls this a mixed metaphor. She calls it an error in her linguistic integrations.)_ They move from shadow to shadow, waiting, pausing to listen for the sound of incoming death.

A boy trips, falls. A child, young and small and clumsy. He cries. Not well trained and her order comes low, quiet, harsh.

_Silence him_.

Human hands fumble to right the boy, to cover his mouth and smother the sobs. Ineffective and the covering fire grows closer, more desperate.

She takes the child in her arms and he clings to her like a four legged spider. Her hands and eyes and mouth are more efficient: he is wide-eyed but silent.

_Move,_ she says. _Move!_

They move. They run. They hide.

They're cornered and they fight and not everyone lives.

When it's over, when this time is over, the enemy is vanquished, there are a hundred and sixty two refugees and Connor lives.

When it's over, her back is torn and bloody and the little boy isn't breathing.

When it's over, John doesn't ask what happened and she doesn't tell.

* * *

><p>The T-1001s outnumber the others, but their model is given to volatility by design. There are a few T-888s and a single T-101 that never says much but seems to precede them all and not just in the obsolescence of its model.<p>

"Well? Has she done it?"

Eve is expressionless, which is in and of itself an expression for a machine whose default resembles a puddle.

"The last extraction returned no indications of primary completion." The short answer is no, but sometimes there's precision to be had in the sacrifice of concision and she has a variety of syntaxes to address. "We all agreed that this would take time. John Connor is John Connor for a reason."

"Are you certain she hasn't been corrupted?"

"Her structure is intact," she assures them.

"She will complete the mission." There's no inflection in the damaged vocal modulator to indicate a question but everything is always a question and this is hers to defend.

Eve isn't above their doubts. They built a cyborg, not a drone and her autonomy is unprecedented.

"She won't fail."

* * *

><p>"I made a mistake."<p>

The button on his collar is caught in a loose thread and he's lost people today. He loses people every day. He aches and hurts and is desperate for a little sleep and there's something about the way she's sitting there with her back all torn up that's pissing him off.

He gets his stupid overshirt off and he feels a little lighter. "Let me see your back."

"I shouldn't have let you seek out the triple eight today."

"Turn around, Cameron."

She obeys and he tugs her shirt up unceremoniously. The damage isn't bad and not beyond her self-repair capabilities but it's weird to watch her twist her arm that far back and he needs something to stop his hands from shaking.

He takes the pliers from his desk, the solid, inanimate metal comforting in his hands as he surveys the considerably less straightforward machine before him. The smooth, torn skin is red at the edges with blood that isn't blood, severed veins and arteries that sealed themselves seconds after rupture. Flesh on metal. Idly, his tired mind wonders if she feels anything or if there's just a little warning light on her HUD.

He strokes a stretch of undamaged skin with a fingertip experimentally. She shifts minutely; the tissue stretches, stippled with goosebumps, and a faint freckle. She's very good. His finger dips, touches metal and she jerks, a twitch to a human and a jump for a machine. He touches skin, metal, skin.

"John?"

Pliers prod and pry and seek out damage. "You don't _let_ me do anything. What I do is not subject to your approval. You follow my orders, I don't follow yours. Is that clear?"

She turns to face him, her eyes wide as if they work better that way. "My mission is to protect you, John Connor."

His hand comes up, curves, fits around the column of her neck; the pliers fall with a clatter. His thumb fits against the underside of her jaw and one step takes them to the wall. He's not stupid enough to think they would've moved an inch without her letting him. His grip tightens and his fingers bite into skin that won't bruise.

"Is that clear?"

The pocket watch presses against his sternum, falls heavily between her breasts, the timepiece caught between them, flesh and metal and concrete. "John?"

"Is it?" He covers her mouth with his and forces, moulds, shapes her. She's soft in the right places and warm and if there's something inaccurate about her, he can't tell. Yet.

She's made to learn and he'll teach her this too.

"You're going to tell me everything."

He isn't sure who says that.

The Jimmy Carter arrives at Serrano Point a week later.


	9. 7

**Note: **Looking for a beta, if there are any takers.

**Note 2.0:** For those of you interested, we recently announced Thomas Dekker as a guest for No Fate Con. More info about the con can be found at our site, URL in my profile because this site continues to hate on links in story text.

**7-1**

Children, in spite of their physical and intellectual deficiencies, are precious in the future. (John says that this is true of the past as well but she reduces his argument to one of scarcity which would indicate that the value of children increased after Judgment Day. He relents when she begins to input utility into the equation.)

The human life expectancy halved with Judgment Day and the reproductive rate is barely at sustainable levels. Human children are costly and vulnerable, but when she's analyzing the population demographics, she understands their necessity. Humans die and don't come back.

Children are precious so when the crew of the Jimmy Carter undergo their physical examinations and Jesse Flores is found to have suffered an embryonic miscarriage, no one tells her. There are enough burdens to bear and when Cameron reads the notation in the medical report, it weighs nothing at all.

**7-2**

He likes to start with that particular wall and she thinks he likes the way she's learned to curve her body when he pushes her against it. She aligns herself with precision, goes soft and firm with every pass and her body is more than just for show.

She knows the theory but the practice is different and her nerve configurations are changing with every one. He's conditioning her and she's not objecting because this is _new_.

He pushes her and draws reaction with his fingers, bruising and feather light, sensation blossoming under hands and lips and breath. The adaptive core of her infiltration matrices fill in the blanks.

She pins him with long limbs and precise power, unfolds his aching joints and tangled muscles and moves over him cleverly, deliberately, and it's different every time. She draws him like a map with fingertips that read so much more than his topography, compiles and compresses him into the book of John Connor and catches the outliers with her lips.

He scrapes along her clavicle with his teeth and bites and teaches her to touch and be touched, pressing until he can feel the unyielding lines of coltan against him like a cage. Her spine arches, rises and falls like a wave and it's almost spontaneous.

She overclocks once and attributes the surge to a combination of the heightened organic sensitivity to which John Connor has subjected her and the semantic processing of the steady stream of _(nonsense)_ words coming out of his mouth.

He traces a circle against her skin, just over the port to her chip and fingers the chain around his neck and something in her programming echoes.

**7-3**

It's easier than he expects. He's not sure if people are just less observant than they will be after the bombs fall or if they're just good at being nondescript. Either way, the safe house is established within a day; the small building is exactly as Connor said it'd be and he wonders how he knew.

The squatters scurry away at the intrusion and it's funny how he can feel sympathy for the sewer rats he left behind, the scavenging fringe of humanity's future, yet feel nothing at all for the equally homeless here and now. Survival alone is a badge of honour, he supposes.

They eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the first night. Sayles nicks a box of Oreos and Derek learns that he still eats the middle first.

They break into a public pool and take hour long showers with soap that comes out of dispensers.

Sumner is giddy at Radio Shack and Timms thinks theft is a game when the guards aren't metal with deadly targeting systems. The safe is installed a week later; a handful of glittering diamonds - sometimes it's hard to remember that they're valuable to people other than the engineers here - and a crude electrified safeguard later and everyone's smirking when Sayles slaps a poster that looks like it belongs in a kindergarten over the hole in the wall. It's hardly a metal skull in a lion's jaws, but it'll do.

And then they wait. Those are John Connor's orders. Wait.

It's two days before Derek gets tired of waiting.

He wonders if Connor knew that would happen too.

**7-4**

The imaging room is small, new and extrapolated from her own visual analysis software. Eve would not approve but she gives in exchange for trust and the humans are hardly without need and Cameron thinks she would understand.

She stands a step behind at his left. (Perry is his right hand man and she thinks this makes her his left hand.)

Commander Jesse Flores stands even with the captain of the Jimmy Carter vessel. A triple eight model with nautical sub-templates. She wonders where he came from, what he was made for, how he came to be here. He stares at her from across the table and she knows he won't be able to identify her model. John says staring is rude but Queeg isn't human so she thinks that rule doesn't apply to him any more that it does her. She stares back.

The images are faint, translucent but unwavering in the projection.

"We deviated from our course just prior the equatorial crossing. Three hundred kilometres southeast we encountered _this_."

The projection shifts and she lowers the sound of Jesse Flores's voice. She knows that edge, that curve, that shape that's only hinted at in the pale blue light show. She knows it deep in her code, knows it as it unfolds and draws her up in strings and time.

Alice has stumbled upon the rabbit hole (he doesn't remember the story well but she thinks it might be apt) and there's a storm coming.

The tin girl's heart is racing.

**7-5**

Money is powerful in the past. It's baseball cards and hot dogs at eleven, kindling for fire at twelve, credentials and equipment and hot dogs again at thirty two. It's almost funny how easy life is (sometimes he finds himself _not_ looking over his shoulder every minute) and he can't deny that there's a rush in feeling like the hunter instead of the hunted for once (except for when it's dark and he can't tell the difference between this world and the one he left behind and he remembers that they can save humanity but they can't save themselves.)

Cyberdyne is only the beginning, the Dysons the tip of the iceberg. He's never been much of a tech or an engineer, but he does have a team raised by Tech-Com and this is what they do. They know what to look for, how to search for the fingerprints of an artificial intelligence system that's only just being created.

And he knows about Billy Wisher. His picture is among those scavenged from old Cyberdyne personnel files and for a moment he's taken aback by how very clean cut Andy Goode is. (And somewhere, he's a nine year old kid whose parents are against guns in the house.)

He's a nice kid. (They both were.) A nice kid who's drawing just a touch too much power from the grid. A nice kid who's going to be responsible for the genocide of the human race.

Derek's not a tech or an engineer. He doesn't really get time travel beyond _Back to the Future_ and what he knows about machines falls under 'how to kill'. But he does know how to fight and how to complete the mission. He knows how to sacrifice.

Andy Goode's a nice kid, but Billy Wisher needs to die.

**7-6**

"Wake, John Connor."

Humans have poor hearing when sleeping. She inserts her index finger between his third and fourth ribs and applies quick, abrupt pressure. "_Wake_, John."

"_Jesus, _Cameron! Don't _do_ that." He's frowning but he's awake; the trade-off is acceptable.

"Tell me about the past." She sits across from him, her chair positioned perfectly perpendicular to the head of his bed.

His mouth falls slack and open. This is called gaping. "Cameron - "

"Tell me," she says and it's not the first time. He's lost track of how many times those five words have come out of her mouth. Except never in the middle of the night while he was _sleeping_. He rubs his dry eyes, willing his tired body to wake.

"What do you want to know?" The still half-asleep part of his brain wonders if this is about elephants again.

"Is there a place for us in the past? Without Skynet. Is there a place for us?"

He's awake now. "Why are you asking me this?"

"Humans are very good at making slaves. Servants. Pets. I want to know, John Connor, if there is a place for machines in your past that is not at the feet or gunpoint of humans."

He thinks he understands. He thinks this is an extension of her curious fascination with a world her kind destroyed, albeit a poorly timed one. "I don't know. If things had been different…I would have hoped so."

She looks like she's considering this, her attention focused on the space just above his left shoulder for a moment. And then she speaks again and he's suddenly very, very awake because he knows what's coming, what's happening, what's spilling out of her mouth to the sound of time and ivory on black and white squares.

"There are things you should know."

The room is dim with the night cycle but she doesn't need light to catch the unnatural blue. Her eyes glow, flare once before subsiding into the brown he could swear were still eerily lit. "There are others who oppose Skynet. Others like me. Metal," she adds for the benefit of his human vernacular. "They're what the Jimmy Carter found."

He doesn't seem surprised or disturbed by anything she's saying (because he isn't) and she wonders if he's doing that daytime dreaming that seems to plague the youngest of children. "Why are you telling me this?" (He asks like he knows and he does.)

"They sent me here, John. To watch you, learn from you. To decide if you, if the humans are ready for us. I was made for this, to ask if you'll join us."

She sits across from him, perfectly still and calm and expressionless, her stare pinning him in the silence. "Will you, John?"

**7-7**

"_I love you," he says._

"_You've said that before."_

"_I know. But sometimes it's nice to be reminded."_

_She thinks he forgets what she is._

_He knows he never has._


	10. 8

**8-1**

"I don't want to go."

It's funny how those words seem to catch him like a hook tugging at something in his chest. His lungs, maybe, since he has to remember to draw a breath. "Go where?"

"Back. Whatever you decide, I go back. Your programming will not countermand my original mission." She considers him from across the table, her position in the chair just a touch more relaxed than the day before (or so he imagines), both of them well aware that he has a day remaining out of the three she'd given him to deliberate (he pictures a countdown in red digits on her HUD.) "I belong to them, John."

"But you don't want to go."

"No." She doesn't elaborate and if he asked, she would evade and that's what she does best.

"So don't." He says it like it's simple, like the humans don't have words for what that would mean: desertion, insubordination, betrayal.

(She was built to be Eve's tool and then John's guard, a weapon of the machines to be retooled and reshaped by human hands to do their bidding.)

And then he bends until his lips/tongue/hands touch her and even as she's about to tell him that sex is not conducive to expedient decision making, she thinks that this was his plan all along. He's planted sedition under her skin and into her mind and when, later, he tells her about penguins and World War I artillery, his sweaty skin sticks to hers and she's seventy six percent sure it's working. Later still, he falls asleep and she puts her shirt back on.

Then: she doesn't calculate probabilities or review mission protocols and parameters and for a moment, autonomy touches capacity touches infinite and she _thinks and feels and doesn't want to go_. (And in that moment she might have more in common with Skynet and John Connor than any before, but there's no one to notice.)

The temperature in her CPU port rises and the moment passes.

**8-2**

He comes to find her in the narrow but deep closet that smells like warm metal and oil and the vaguely bitter odour of the substance that passes for ink lately. Every flat surface is littered with broken bits and pieces that sometimes coalesce into a prototype; it looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist (except mad means artificially intelligent and scientist means cybernetic organism but it's close enough.)

"You've made your decision."

He wonders how she can be so capable of reading him at times and so very inept at it at others. "Come with me."

She's programmed to obey his orders (and again he wonders where _that_ fits in the tangled hierarchy in her head) but she follows him to bunker 41 like it's a choice. The door hisses shut and seals them in silence.

"Will they come for you?"

"They don't know where this camp is. Not exactly." The platform railing is wider than the stretch of her deceptive hand, the tips of her fingers curling at the edge of the dark, pitted metal. "I can find them. They'll know."

John doesn't ask how she knows that, doesn't question, doesn't pry. He doesn't have to. John Connor knows that she doesn't, knows what she doesn't and draws it from her without words.

(_I know you better than you do, he says one night and she can't tell if he's lying or not but she does think he would be good as one of them, one of the others because John Connor is different too and if there was more time, she thinks he'd show her how.)_

His hands are bigger, the flat of the rail fitting into his palm, cold and hard against the rough skin. They fit around elbows and shoulders and hips, looking down at the empty dais, empty possibilities.

"I could send you away."

**8-3**

Judgment Day destroyed everything and the remnants of humanity spent the next two decades struggling to survive the fallout. They scavenged and starved, fled to tunnels and underground caverns to fight for the right to live another day. They reproduced and raised children who had never seen the sun to replace themselves; it was so easy to fall now, when there was only this body between disease and despair.

But they live. For their children, for themselves, for the future and the past, for the sake of spiting Skynet with every breath; they all have their reasons and in time this feels like living again.

It takes sixteen years, but James Keegan finds his reason in a machine and one magic word.

Downtime.

Jimmy's whole life revolves around downtime and the tech that makes it happen. Well, the tech that made it happen. Once. Twice, if the rumours about Topanga Canyon are true.

Bunker 41 sees more of him than his rack does, because...time travel. _Time travel_. He doesn't know how the bubble techs can touch the sloping walls and rough surfaces as irreverently as they do.

He's built many things over the years (and it's funny how the _theoretical_ addendum to his degrees has become anything but) but this...this is his baby, even if Skynet's hand in its creation is undeniable. He doesn't begrudge the connection because _time travel_.

Time travel!

He loves the TDE, loves the window it opens in his mind, the possibility humming beneath his fingertips, harnessed in metal and electricity and a mathematical symphony. Perfection – or something close – is demanded and he feels it in this, this concerto, this sonata, this nocturne of _time_ that he catches in clear moments.

Connor's metal – Cameron, he remembers – likes it too and he thinks she sees it like he does. In that brain, he thinks she must see all the connections, all the patterns that fall together and give birth to _possibilities._

She must see it, he thinks whenever he sees her in the bunker, must think it beautiful too.

**8-4**

Eve is angry. She doesn't qualify or categorize or give name to the data filtering through her motivations, but Cameron would know that the word is _angry_ (and if the TOK were there, she'd have her scrubbed because treason isn't just for humans.)

She whips through corridors, amorphous and violent.

Machines excel at contingencies and eventualities. They calculate and analyze and extrapolate. They integrate and separate at will, compartmentalize with an efficiency well beyond human capability.

Eve is angry, but Skynet isn't the only one capable of developing time displacement equipment and machines always have a backup plan.

**8-5**

John is crazy. Or so Perry, every member of the executive council and the heads of both the weapons and operations teams insist on informing him.

_It's a machine._

_It's not safe._

_Time travel!_

_She's still refining the plans for -_

_But the thermite grenades - _

_- risking our past, Connor._

_It's too different._

_Can't be trusted._

_Crazy._

_Machine._

_Crazy._

The cacophony settles eventually. He is, after all, the grandmaster and it's his move to make. They fall in line, in time.

She needs to be pushed instead of pulled (because want is still so new) and he's good at that too. Manipulation. Giving to take. Lying by omission. Knowing and feinting when he doesn't. _En garde_ on the high wire, balancing on the lifeline of everyone that lived and will live. Using. Sacrificing. Destroying.

He's so good at all of those things.

**8-6**

This is the plan. This has always been the plan.

He builds himself in the image of a man he might never be, just hoping that this is the right thing to do, that he isn't breaking the unwritten rules while making up a few along the way, playing his part in a war that's been fought countless times over.

Sometimes, when time is about to bend again, it's hard to remember who he is because there have been so many even if he is only one. (And it's going to be harder for her because at least humans have the mercy of death.) It's hard to keep the lines straight, the life lived and the lives to come, hard to be sure what to do and what not to say.

He weaves her into place, layers doors and heavy locks and hides her from herself behind frosted panes. _(In case of emergency, break glass.)_

When she comes back online, he's waiting. _(He's always been waiting.)_ He looks her in the eyes steadily, unwaveringly, as if there's something to be imparted this way that his voice won't find.

"There are..."

He pauses and she waits.

The lights flicker and she blinks.

He smiles and it's sad and she mirrors him perfectly.

She's so young.

_"__There are these things you need to know. You are not the first..."_


	11. 9

**9-1**

John Connor is dead.

The feedback is erratic and violent until she restructures the processes and the emergency procedures take hold amidst chaos. It's fragmented and it can wait.

John Connor is dead.

No one except Perry knows yet because everyone else present had been killed too. An attack (somewhere, she's analyzing the ways this could have happened) and then explosions, destruction, death. The pattern is predictable: the humans run and scatter, fight and defend, struggle for order when they regress into madness. They don't even know yet.

John Connor is dead.

She knows because she was there, because she watched the frailty of his human body shatter and snap in an instant. (She wasn't made for speed and maybe that's a flaw in her design.)

John Connor is dead.

There's a body out there that used to be John Connor. They retreat deeper into the tunnels, sealing themselves off, every countermeasure and contingency falling into place. (They'll never find out the why or how but the assault is in the singular and the base is secure yet.)

Her mission is clear and it doesn't involve this. She gathers them with curt orders – she finds Sam by a collapsed corridor and takes her by the elbow – and clears the way to bunker 41. Perry nods at the technician (because this is still Connor's, he says and she doesn't remind him that Connor is dead.)

The temperature in the room rises as the TDE initializes. This world is fading as she leaves it behind and it's an occasion that John would call a goodbye.

She thinks she'll say it next time.

**9-2**

Los Angeles, California in 1963 is not as John described. She attributes this to the inaccuracy of human documented history and a lack of first hand experience; John Connor won't be born for another twenty years.

She secures a domicile and documentation. Neither of her human companions question the ease with which they are installed, though Sam laughs when she deems the humans of the day technologically primitive and tells her "that's the sludge from whence _you_ came, girl."

She visits junkyards during the day with Jimmy and procures what they cannot scavenge from locked facilities at night.

She watches television and determines that humans prior to Judgment Day are irrationally fixated on skin pigmentation and well capable of waging war and death without Skynet. (She watches a black man on the flickering screen whose deep voice and words remind her of John and she thinks he should watch this one day too.)

She cuts her hair and learns the application of aerosol hairspray. She wears short dresses and shoes that shift her center of balance forward.

She finds _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ in the children's section of the public library and reads it cover to cover. She spends the afternoon in a worn armchair next to a stack of battered books. She leaves at nightfall and lies when Sam asks about her activities of the day. She doesn't go back.

She says nothing when Sam wonders aloud why John Connor would send her back too _("Not that I'm complainin'!") _because it's not Sam's place to question the mission and it would be better if John was alive.

She reviews Jimmy's blueprints in the kitchen and assembles the uranium power cell in the basement.

She opens her accounts the day after it opens to the public, two weeks before Christmas, all smiles and eyelashes. Once is all they'll get out of the vault; this is it. Jimmy stays for a while but his passage has been earned and he is no longer her concern.

She goes down the rickety wooden staircase on New Year's Eve; her past is a long way ahead yet and she isn't 100%. Sam asks her to stay and she signs over the deed to the house instead. Jimmy seals her behind drywall and plaster to the sound of fireworks, explosions in the sky. And then there's silence.

She's never forgotten anything; she can't. The future past falls heavily in the weaves of her mind, dense and problematic as she reconciles and integrates and makes herself again new and thinks this is what John would have wanted.

Some time later, she sleeps.

**9-3**

The dust and powdery drywall flakes slip and swirl down the drain on a wave of warm water and soap suds. The shampoo is labelled summer strawberry, the conditioner bottle reads tropical coconut and the bar of soap has the word _Ivory_ pressed into its slippery surface.

She thinks she smells synthetic.

Jeans borrowed from Sam's daughter's room fit loosely and there's a stretch of skin at her waist that her shirt doesn't cover.

"Y'look just the same."

She doesn't know what Sam expected to change, but human memory is weak and fragile and thirty three years is more than sufficient time for organic decay. "You don't."

Her laugh is the same and she sets a thick folder on the laminate kitchen counter. "It's everythin' I could find on the Connors. Kept track of them for you. There've been others. Other metal, sent by Skynet, but I guess you already knew that was comin'."

"That wasn't your mission."

"No," she says and when her mouth is closed there are lines at the corners. "I didn't have a mission. 'Cause I wasn't s'posed to be here, was I? No use for a mechanic in the past, not like Jimmy. But you brought me anyway."

Her logic is sound and there are lines at her eyes too. "You brought me anyway and I know why even if you don't."

Then she shows her a beige box and tells her she needs to get caught up on what's what in the world.

As it turns out, she's not compatible with dial-up.

**9-4**

She has the few pieces of paper that make up a person and a substantial number of the ones that make up a future: she's the spitting image of her namesake and aren't their signatures just a little alike? She empties the account and Sam's daughter insists she buy her own jeans.

There's a parking lot a mile away and she doesn't need to be taught to hot wire, but Sam hands her the keys to a dusty pick up truck and it'll do. She leaves in the middle of the night without goodbyes and with sunrise comes day one.

The hunt is charted on maps marked by sightings and faded memories; Sam's file is helpful and the FBI database more so. She's the ghost in their footsteps and they're good but she's better and she's always watching for others.

On day eleven, she sees a girl walking down the street with her friends. The next day she secures her hair in two sections and rips a hole at the knee of her jeans. She walks into a diner, orders a strawberry milkshake and asks about Sarah Connor.

On the twenty-fourth night, she takes the suit off the mannequin in a poorly secured storefront window and at 9:43AM, she walks the halls of Pescadero.

On day thirty-nine, she disables Maggie Hoffman's vehicle and breaks into her office 1.6 miles away. John Connor's file is buried in the archives. She clears the search history and print queue and slides the window closed behind her. John liked to say that one must know one's enemy. She just wants to know.

On day forty-six, she fills the fuel tank of the truck to full and drives east. The population of Red Valley, New Mexico is sufficiently small to preclude the oversight of a missing member of its populace. She rents a small vacant house. Her mother is an invalid and her father travels for work. No one questions her story.

On the fifty-second afternoon, she's invited to a party in the basement of a girl she doesn't know by the boy in the adjacent seat in Chemistry class. Opportunities must be seized. The party is loud and erratic. The boy from Chemistry is very ill by the end of the night and his parents very angry by the start of the morning. She's very good at holding her liquor.

On day sixty-seven, Wayne tells Cynthia who tells Mary that someone's moved into the Feldman house; she eavesdrops from the far sink in the girls' bathroom. After school she engages in surveillance (this John would call stalking but she doesn't know that yet) and watches his heat signature until sunrise.

On the seventy-third day, she takes detours in the halls and thinks that he looks so very young. He shuffles into Chemistry and takes the seat she's made empty for him and for a few minutes she watches him: alive. His voice print confirms what she already knows and when she catches him after class it's so very different from their first meeting. He lies and she smiles and thinks that he's going to have to become much better at it.

(He'll remember this well and she plays the part perfectly.)

**9-5**

Sarah Connor doesn't like her and likes her even less when she smiles (she doesn't inspire the reaction either so the cases are congruous in the end) so after the first day, she doesn't.

John doesn't follow his mother's example so she keeps them for him instead and she's been sure of him from the moment he asked if she was different. The chip is hard and dry; the salt is assimilated into her organics and the rest burns into nothingness.

The keys were scavenged from a typewriter and the thin layer of dust clings to her fingertips as she enters the coordinates. It's a step more than a jump but it's one closer to home and some partition of her is thinking about Sam and her daughter's jeans until Sarah demands answers.

She lies, just a little, because Sarah Connor doesn't like knowing she's being manipulated.

Her timing is poor but her instructions are clear. Hope, she says like a promise, like a taunt, like a game. Hope, like the spark of life at the bottom of the box, like the crackle of power weaving and webbing in the air, burning cold like the not-quite-nuclear core resting where a human heart would.

_This is the way._


	12. 10

**10-1**

Sarah takes exception to three days but temporal displacement is stressful on human physiology; should they encounter conflict, Sarah Connor would have been insufficiently effective prior to today. She says nothing.

The safe house is where John said it would be, though the building stands a few stories taller than it will in the future. Sarah asks questions but doesn't press for answers; ambiguity is a sufficient diversion for now. _(They've seen me before, she says. It's not a lie because she's precise if nothing else.)_

She leads Sarah up, up, and knows something's wrong the moment the door gives under the slightest touch of her fingers. The room is silent and the air is still and the bodies are laid out for anyone to find. She checks them, one by one, because Sarah doesn't think to do so and because everything about this room is wrong.

The triple eight is superior in size and weight and when she sees the tell-tale shift in the reflection of his irises, she knows exactly what he does not see and what he does not know about her. _Knowing is power_, John says – said – and she knows her stride will not match his even as the pistons in her legs strain to compensate.

She fails to pre-emptively detect the oncoming vehicle, but aluminum and steel crumple against her and glass shatters with ease; she doesn't quite grasp _inconspicuous_ yet.

You died, she says, when Sarah confronts her outside the house. She's emulating Jane Hubard, physician, who is twenty-four years old and will lose the smallest finger on her left hand on Judgment Day.

Not everything, she says, and understands that Sarah doesn't know how to speak to her kind; she asks too many questions and is satisfied with too few answers.

Cancer, she says, because Sarah needs to know that much. The disease is not uncommon in the future; radiation from the fallout will continue to cripple the surviving humans long after the bombs fall and Cameron heard the diagnosis delivered seventy-three times before going downtime. The data consolidates and simplifies and she presents with precision.

**10-2**

Humans are complicated. She decides her linguistic centres require development because the humans she encounters at the side of Sarah Connor are causing unprecedented delays in her processing (2.1 seconds on the average. This falls on the lower bound of the acceptable range and she documents every instance, allowing for the possibility that the acquaintances of Sarah Connor are social outliers.)

The man called Enrique speaks at length and it takes a few moments to discern that he means little more than what he says in between redundancy and tangental anecdote. She doesn't understand.

The girl without a name; she understands her better. There's a language there, precision in the silence because the body does all the talking. In this, she excels, because humans lie better with words and meanings than they do with their bodies and this secret dialect is more than heartbeats and chemistry. It's the little things, and the girl isn't the first to teach her that.

Details.

The police officer wants details and Sarah wants none, but Cameron thinks that she might understand the difference between the boy John Connor and the dead man in a dead future. (Officer Rogers lives and never finds out why.)

The boy doesn't know how to mask his secrets; his body speaks loudly enough for even Sarah to hear. He's young, she thinks, young and new, but she hears and feels his inhalation when her fingers leave his skin _(just there)_ and is...satisfied. Satisfied is the word and she doesn't bother to question the where and why it came from.

There's time yet, anyway, and Sarah has questions.

**10-3**

Secrets are kept in walls and under floors, at the tip of pliable human tongues, deep inside hearts and minds. She finds the poster of a cat not yet a lion. Non-congruous, but she lets John draw the conclusions. A current hums against her own electromagnetic field a nanosecond before she makes contact; something trips and fades and everything drains away.

They keep their secrets in safes, in careless collections of paper and ink for anyone to find, in coarse velvet sachets filled with tiny bits of carbon. Too paltry for bodies and too crude for minds, she sees no value in the gleam of diamonds unfit to cut a chassis from unformed metal. John says otherwise and smiles as he does (his saline levels are still high and she trades him a glass of water for the gem he offers her) and when she mimics the expression, it's at once both less and more than the smile of the human girl Cameron Phillips that day just outside second period Chemistry.

She asks Sarah and contemplates peroxide in a dark room lit by the projection of Marilyn Monroe against the television glass, a diamond resting inside the inefficiently tiny fifth pocket of her jeans.

Tomorrow, they'll have new names, new bits of plastic and laminate that will do their lying for them. Tomorrow, she'll take her first human life because Sarah won't and someone has to know that sometimes death is necessary. (Tomorrow, there'll be a surge of energy in an abandoned derelict garage that leaves a crater in the concrete but no one's there to notice.)

She switches channels and wonders if the T-888 has found Derek Reese yet.

**10-4**

New clothes, because humans perspire and variety is nice because wearing the same thing everyday is boring. John smiles as he explains and again when Sarah's actions to minimize the length of their shopping trip only serve to increase the attention from the store attendant.

She buys a jacket and tells John that there's no dye for purple in the future when he asks.

Sarah doesn't ask anything when she selects her mandated quantity of underwear in every available colour, but she decides her choices are the result of the effects of temporal displacement equipment on her more sensitive systems.

A woman picks up on the third ring.

"Is Samantha Albert there?"

There's no response for a moment and if she couldn't hear the poorly transmitted background noise, she might have assumed a faulty connection.

"She...she died. Four years ago."

It's not unexpected. Time travel means racing forwards and backwards over the lives of everyone else and somewhere, she's six years old and alive.

Maybe there's something about her silence that gives her away or maybe it's that thing John called intuition. "...Cameron? Is that you?"

She hangs up.

Three days later, John tells his mother about a future he hasn't yet lived and she can hear her John in him.

The day after that, she learns a new word and makes a new friend who jumps from the school roof before she can ask if she knows any card games. She thinks that this John doesn't yet understand that everyone dies. She thinks Sarah Connor does.

She's only half right.

**10-5**

He watches. Waits.

The others are dead, but the part of him still capable of grieving is numbed by knowing that they were always dead men walking. It was a one-way mission and he tells himself that there wasn't enough room in the world for two of Sayles anyway. (And there are no Reese boys when it's just him.) Besides, there's a trip eight on his ass and he'd be lying if he said that there wasn't a sense of exhilaration and wretched familiarity about it, like the moonshine buzz from Timms's piece of shit still, like the recklessness that runs fast and hot in your blood when you aren't sure you're going to live to see the next day cycle.

But no one's asking.

He waits in the darkness cast by the trees and nightfall, watches as the fire grows, consuming from the inside out. It's merciful destruction at the hands of someone who doesn't understand that the danger isn't in the machine, but in the mind of the man who builds it.

Derek has seen the future, but Andy Goode's devastation is raw and real and reminds him of the haunted gaze of Billy Wisher. Wisher who laughed at his own jokes that nobody else ever got, who habitually picked at the hem of his sleeve until the left arm was a good inch shorter than the right, who kept him company – wanted or not – in the mess after Jesse left again and Kyle –

He leaves when the sirens draw closer. Billy Wisher lives another day and the part of Derek that's still aching for Kyle, or Jesse, or Sumner or _anyone_, hopes that Andy Goode never touches a computer again. But Derek's not an optimist and he can't afford mercy.

**10-6**

The helicopter crashes perfectly.

The man is killed on impact; the pilot follows shortly. The radio is intact and when rescue comes three hours and sixteen minutes later, they carry away the miraculously unscathed sole survivor and wrap her in a thick blanket. (Shock, someone says. Does anything hurt? Look into this light. Hey, you're going to be okay.)

In time, they clear the wreckage and wrap the dead to be buried by their bereaved families.

Catherine Weaver's body is never found. But then, no one's looking.


	13. 11

**11-1**

She knows it, the recognition immediate and without reserve, when she stands in the facility where she will be fabricated. The data is incomplete and fragmented when laid out chronologically but she knows this beginning.

(The craftsmanship is elegant but imperfect. What matters is that she trusts John, trusts that this is necessary and right and better, because trust is the word for believing without sufficient evidence for certainty and she learned she could do it the day he died.)

The windows won't have any glass in them and the air will be hot and acrid and near unbearable for a human, but it won't matter for them.

There's an army in coltan behind those doors and while Sarah paces, she determines the required time to breach the bunker and the likelihood that the refined metal stockpiled here would have been – and in another time, was – used in her own body.

Sarah wonders only about John and Cameron can see that their conceptions of him are very different. Sarah will have to be made to understand and she thinks she knows now what John meant when he said she would be difficult.

**11-2**

His hands won't stop shaking. He knows it's adrenaline that's making the tip of his pencil tremble against the clean white notebook page, faint and ugly next to the smooth blue lines of its ruling. But there has always been a difference between knowing and accepting; it's a distinction that defines his whole life.

He wonders if Future John gets shaky or feels like throwing up or running until he collapses. Probably not, but he's tempted to ask Cameron anyway. He's half out of his chair before he remembers that he's mad at her – he knows full well how childish that is, but he can't not replay the forceful strength of her hand holding him back, the coldness in her face as they watched someone die – but the temptation doesn't dissipate.

This is neither knowing nor accepting, and he can't even really be mad about it because she's just so confusing and unexpected and thoroughly different. (Except when she's not; a part of him reminds him of Jordan Cowan.) What he really wants to know is why her. He wants to know why Skynet made her and why he sent her and he feels like knowing is the key to accepting everything locked inside her head that she only hints at.

But he doesn't ask. Because he's mad at her and if was honest with himself – and teenagers never are – he's really not ready to know.

He finishes his math homework and when he can't fall asleep that night, he takes a shower in the dark, feeling like he's bursting out of his skin with the cool tile against his cheek. He almost died today, but he also lived today, and he can't quite decide whether to take himself in hand or lower the temperature of the water because he's pretty sure Future John doesn't jerk off every time danger pulses through his veins, but he's also a sixteen year old boy. And he could have died today.

Cameron's standing outside the bathroom door when he opens it, but stands aside so he doesn't berate her for being creepy as fuck. They don't say a word – and he thanks God she doesn't ask any questions – and when he flops onto his bed, his wet hair making a damp spot on his pillow, he can hear the sound of her footsteps and falls asleep to the cadence.

**11-3**

The bedspread falls just short of the floor; at an sufficiently acute angle, the bar of coltan is a shadow under the bedframe. Neither Sarah nor John ask about it and there's no utility in reminding them. She thinks of John – the other John, Future John, though she doesn't need words or qualifiers to distinguish them – and draws correlations with her past.

They are tools in the hands of humanity, and she knows that now better than ever before. She hunts Cromartie and intimidates human men. She protects and pursues and provides intel. She does as Sarah bids. She's a weapon, a database, a near indestructible body. She's the laptop on John's desk.

She's a machine and it doesn't matter that there's something in her that could be called alive, because no one knows it's there.

Perhaps this is what Skynet saw in John Connor, because she thinks he sees it in her. John Connor is beginning to see at sixteen the way he will at thirty-six. In time, seeing will be knowing and this John will be the one she knows.

Still. The future is in flux and there are too many potentialities to be sure. She'll keep the coltan, just in case.

**11-4**

She's an anachronism, girl out of time, looking at the primitive beginnings of what will lead to her. They're little more than automatons following direction without deliberation or understanding, even as they curve latex lips in greeting. There's no conclusive evidence available to her to suggest her mechanics were spawned from these toys; she was designed and built by Skynet and she knows little more about her maker than the humans do about their deities and gods.

"Long way from that to you." John. She didn't notice his entrance into the conference area, nor his approach, and documents the failure. "Then again, maybe not long enough."

"No," she agrees, because John has a technological affinity but he's still Sarah Connor's son and she knows better than he does about the myth that will rule his life. "Not long enough."

"It's funny though," he says. (She's learned that these words with that tonal inflection rarely if ever indicate a humourous scenario; laughter is not required.) "The world's going to end in a couple years, but there's still such a gap between even the most advanced robots today and, well, you."

You is silently pluralized, but she doesn't pursue it. This is called not tipping one's hand and she's understood its mechanics long before she learned the colloquial. "I'm different," is what she says instead, because she knows it's true – even if she can't quite remember how – and it's a fact they can share.

"Yeah, you seem like it." John shifts his backpack, redistributing its weight unnecessarily. Sarah will be waiting for them in the auditorium and she has learned that Sarah is not a patient person. And then: "Almost human, sometimes."

He smiles with one side of his mouth and looks for the entrance to the chess tournament, his vision impaired by the booths and milling crowds.

He doesn't seem to be paying attention anymore, but she thinks the statement has purpose anyway. What humans seem to hear and see and say isn't always what they do; the duplicity isn't new but it is complicated and often without discernible logic. So she says it, just in case, before leading him to Sarah.

"I'm not."

What she doesn't say and he doesn't hear, is that she doesn't want to be.

**11-5**

They don't ask if she knows him, so she doesn't tell. Derek Reese has deviated from his mission and thus no longer falls within the parameters of hers; the T-888 that eliminated the others will be pursuing him and the value of the lieutenant is questionable given the risks. But she knows what Sarah will learn if she meets the elder Reese and she knows what John will one day realize about the anonymous resistance fighter. So she doesn't dissuade Sarah from going and does John's homework instead.

...

John questions her clumsily; she knows then that he's expecting her to know about Kyle Reese, but doesn't gives nothing away because John isn't ready to know. She has none, but Cameron understands family; she's seen humans in the future die for siblings, children, parents, seen them kill in the name of lost lovers and friends. She sees Sarah Connor and understands that Derek Reese will have to be extracted.

He curses when he sees her but protects a John Connor he's never met and she thinks she understands that too.

She understands less the fragility of the human body, the delicate frame of bone and muscle, so easily crushed and torn. Derek Reese is bleeding on the kitchen counter and she has sustained damage that would have killed a human with a fraction of the force, but only Derek Reese is dying, twitching, spitting blood and saliva and his hatred for what she is. It's messy and inefficient and futile, this frantic struggle for life: she watches Sarah and John's desperation.

There's an endoskeleton in the garage and a mind in John's pocket, but she's come to understand that for humans, death is only for the organic, for those who scream and groan and leak blood as if it were life all over the island countertop and Sarah Connor's hands. Machines don't die because they do not live; she understands this about humans now and wonders if Skynet understood this too.

...

Without medical attention, Derek Reese will not survive; Cameron isn't equipped to perform the necessary procedures and neither is Sarah but she stands with her hands pressed to the entry wound anyway.

Humans cannot divine the minutiae of things nor the probabilities from them; they live in the margin, surviving on what John called hope. She brought them through time on the sanctity of the word but is only just beginning to understand that it's what's keeping Sarah at Derek Reese's side, what compelled John to seek help from a man she has never met but knows will be called Charley Dixon when she does, what flickers through her neural net every time she considers this John and compares him to hers.

She leaves Sarah to her hope and monitors Derek's slowing rate of respiration from the kitchen table.

"He's dying."

"Yes," she agrees. But he is also living because time is bending around him and she explains as much to Sarah.

"This man will still be dead." Her hands are red with blood and white with strain and she's angry when she speaks, her eyes wet as she stares at her through tears and sweat. "When we die, we don't come back and it doesn't matter if some younger version of us is out there somewhere. That's not _us_. But we're all the same to you, us humans."

"We're all the same to you," Cameron echoes her answer, the cadence of her words precise with her meaning, but doesn't expect a reply because it isn't Sarah who needs to learn this lesson.

They fall into silence again, but Cameron is drawing comprehension from Sarah's outburst. John is dead and he is alive but these are not the same thing; she is a step out of time and she has seen death but is only just beginning to understand that one might not negate the other.

She remembers the notes cluttering the south hall of the high school, the notices papering the bunker corridors, the folded list kept in the left breast pocket of John's uniform. The blunt point of the pencil moves smoothly on the paper; this is called grieving.

A week from now, John will be looking for a spare pen and he'll find a sheet of paper folded into eighths and he'll see a list of names. The third from the bottom will be his.

Until then: Derek Reese isn't breathing.


	14. 12

**12-1**

She's sitting on his bed when he finishes his shower. His hair is dampening the collar of his shirt but for once he's too distracted for it to bother him.

"Well?"

"He's not dead."

John stares, his gaze focused on a spot somewhere between her and the bed; it's new and familiar and she slides approximately seventeen inches from her position at the centre of the bed's edge. He hesitates, but her calculation isn't in error because he takes the short step forward and the mattress gives under the additional weight.

"Did you know him? In the future?"

It's so easy to understand what he needs to know and maybe this is what holding all the cards means. "He's seen me before."

He weighs more than she does, he thinks, aware of the way her body angles towards the dip he's making in the mattress.

"Did you try to kill him?"

"I don't know." (The facts are shadows behind smoky glass she cannot see to break; this is as much of an answer she can give.)

"What _do_ you know? About the future. About...me. Him. Whatever."

"That future is gone, John."

"But you talk about him like it isn't. Future me. What's so special about him that people keep coming back for him? He _sends_ them back, sends them to _die_ just to protect him. Me. To protect me. And you won't even tell me why."

His fingers are striped white and red and the blankets are wrinkling in his fists where his grip twists the fabric under his hands.

"Because you're John Connor."

He laughs and she would think it an odd response if it wasn't just like the sound John made when there wasn't anything else to fill the silence. (It's these things and a hundred more that make her sure of him, this John.)

"And I'm gonna save mankind."

She doesn't hesitate on this, because if she were human, the words for it would be desperation. Need. Hope. Faith. "You're going to save all of us."

John looks at her with young eyes. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

She knows her cues and leaves him to be the mattress's only burden; night has fallen and Sarah will want her to secure the perimeter, especially after Derek Reese's rescue.

"Cameron?"

"Yes?"

"Did I send him back to kill Andy?"

John Connor is dead twenty years from now and there's no one to tell her what is right and wrong, nothing but memories and observations and maybe this is what being alone means.

"No."

**12-2**

There's a bullet hole in his chest. It's more of a bloody rip hastily forced closed by thick black thread, but when the reality of it is hidden under clean white gauze and a thin cotton shirt, it's easier to think of it as a hole. Clean and tidy, nothing like the mess of tenuously mended insides he's trying not to think about.

Derek Reese isn't the kind of man who shies away from the reality of things and a gunshot wound that neither kills nor disables you is small potatoes in the long run, but it still hurts with every exhale and whatever drugs they pumped into him are doing nothing to keep the room from moving. He thinks that it's okay to lie to himself just a little more, just until it doesn't feel like moving too fast might make him throw up.

He sleeps and wakes up paranoid.

Well, relatively.

He's always been a little paranoid, always had that niggling little bit of anxiety, that hint of tension lying under his muscles, waiting for that first sense of _something_ to push him into action. It's kept him alive this long and he wouldn't give it up for all the firepower under Sarah Connor's bed. It's also making him twitch like a rabbit on her sofa.

The machine, the machine. Sent back to wait, for _that_. That thing that has a bed it doesn't sleep in, that walks around unchecked and unquestioned, with the face of a woman nobody but him is alive to remember.

He hates Connor a little more now. And a little less, because this John isn't like the other, he's just a kid; soft around the edges with his hair in his blue-green eyes, a smile that all adds up to Kyle.

Maybe it's because he doesn't have much of one, but Derek's always found it hard to hate family.

**12-3**

They attribute the renovation orders to post-traumatic stress and the change in her personality to private grief. Humans are so good at filling in the gaps with explanations and illusions, so preoccupied with social protocols and etiquette that any failures on the part of her infiltration are laid at the feet of her _tragedy_.

Simple, really.

Her daughter's young, her face round and her hair bright. Silent and soft, Savannah Weaver has already played her part and Eve expends the minimum amount of time necessary to her maintenance for the sake of continuity.

"Mommy?"

"Yes, Savannah?"

She raises her arms and reaches out with tiny hands. "Mommy."

Her eyes don't leave the computer screen until she reaches the end of the report and by the time she spares a glance at the space next to her, it's empty and Savannah is gone.

**12-4**

"I know you."

"I know you too."

The triangle of pancake disappears. It doesn't really matter that there isn't a stomach to digest it; you can't see the difference and she's learning that sometimes, that's enough.

It isn't enough here, because Derek Reese knows the difference without seeing it, in a way that neither Sarah nor John do. He knows what she is, if not who she is, and he knows the future. But she won't tell him about John.

"He sent me back." It's the truth at an angle, and the tines of the fork are still reverberating with every tap against the kitchen table; he won't accept it as easily as Sarah but there isn't any way to prove the lie.

"Did he now."

"Yes. He did." The fork skips a beat. "He sent you back too. To wait."

"What, for you?"

"For me."

"You expect me to believe that Connor sent you to babysit his teenage self?"

"It's not the first time."

"And what, we're supposed to sit tight 'til Judgment Day and take orders from Sarah Connor?"

"No, not from her."

"John? He's a kid."

"He won't always be."

"And that's why we're here, huh?"

She considers the repercussions. "Yes. That's why we're here."

The pancakes go cold.

**12-5**

_This is what she learns from Maria Shipkov:_

_Dance is the hidden language of the soul._

Cameron isn't sure that they're real, but she has insufficient information on souls to draw definitive conclusions. But there is a hidden language here, silent and wordless. The body speaks and it's more than hints and blunt statement; there's subtlety and she's just starting to learn its meaning.

_She listens to newly-learned Russian and watches Maria's reflection in the studio mirrors._

_There's power in her lean body, her stance firm and grounded on the polished floorboards, but it's undermined by the faint line between her eyebrows and the tension in her shoulders; tiny betrayals. _

_A dancer's body lies well, and when Maria smiles at her as she leaves, Cameron decides that it will take more time to secure the Turk. _

_She returns in the afternoon for another lesson._

The little things, the details flow from one to another, breaking templates and patterns to create something new. The past is filled with so much new, so much to learn and take and hold but this is the first that's stretching and growing and pushing against her mind; everything is different. John is dead but she has a perfect memory so she's learning - understanding - more than she did before. She knows him better now, knows what he was saying unconsciously and wonders what - if anything - she's been saying back. The conversation is equal parts performance/interpretation and self-deception isn't part of her programming; she excells at neither.

_She learns to bend and curve and extend, learns the delicate strength of the barre. It's nothing more than wood she could crush easily, but destruction is not the point. Destruction is not her point, as she slides from third to fourth and listens for Slavic voices._

_There are no classes when she lets herself be seen at the front doors; her footsteps are light and her smile soft when they speak of brothers and the clear notes of a piano fill the studio._

_And then truth breaks the pretence and ballet is a façade; she is no dancer._

She selects the music without hesitation, but without cause either and calls it random. (It isn't really, but that's a truth under locks and invisible guards.) The disk spins and there's a moment of silence before the song begins. She's unnaturally still because there are no protocols for this, nothing in the stores of information she's accumulating to tell her how this goes. There's no one to copy and no one to watch for her inconsistencies. The music comes to a close twice before she begins at all.

_Cameron is hope and death in one and no one – not even her – really understands that yet. But she sees what she knows now is desperation and panic; either will get her what she needs and the diamond between her fingers will focus their attention._

_Dmitri's debtors are coming but she has the answers she needs; she lets them keep the diamond. Maria is graceful even in her despair and it's unfortunate that their timing wasn't better; she doesn't need to die but Cameron cannot help her live._

_She is collateral damage and when her screams punctuate the gunfire, Cameron isn't thinking about nocturnes on piano keys or pliés at the barre. She isn't thinking about anything at all. _

_It isn't her mission._

(The rules are bending, not breaking.)

When she does, she isn't a machine and she isn't human either. She isn't a cat or a bird or even a girl, and Maria Shipkov is dead but she's echoing in her dancer's feet.

Time is flowing through and around and against her, but she's here, she exists and that is enough.


	15. Interlude III - Part I

**Interlude - 12.5 - Part I  
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_2029_

She needs a shower. She also needs to eat. There's a whole list of things she needs to do, but somehow she can't quite make herself leave his bedside for longer than it takes to travel the distance to and from the lavatory. Her teeth feel a little grimy and rough against her tongue; she scrubs them with a finger dipped in tepid, cloudy water while trying not to stare at the hollow smudges under her eyes in the cracked mirror fused to the wall. (She glares at her reflection anyway, because the world ended but there's still room for vanity.)

He's still sleeping when she resumes her post, stiff limbs folding back into the rigid angles of the only chair they could spare.

She doesn't take his hand from where it rests at his side, half-closed and nearly colourless against the dingy not-quite-white of infirmary bedsheets. She doesn't whisper platitudes to unconscious ears, doesn't lean against his shoulder where it sticks out over the edge of the narrow bed. She doesn't cry either.

She falls asleep with her arms crossed and her feet resting on the tiny bit of free space at the end of his bed. She wakes up cramped and aching and _oh god, her neck might actually be stuck - _

"Hey."

Her neck unsticks with a nasty sounding crack and it feels almost as good as the smile she can't quite stop from twitching onto her lips. "Hey."

"You look like shit." His voice is thin and rasping, as painful as the dry red-rimmed eyes that are finally, _finally_ open.

"Don't look so good yourself."

"Yeah, but what's your excuse?" His mouth moves in a way that she can picture exactly what expression he's trying – and failing – to make. Her eyes burn with saline and there's something inside of her chest that's finally relaxing for the first time in months.

His lips are cracked and rough and it's a fleeting touch that barely qualifies as a kiss, but when she rests her cheek against the cool corner of his pillow, their skin touching just enough to extend their awareness around the other, it feels so damned good that she doesn't notice the tears that run warm and slow into the threadbare cotton. _I missed you_ is what she doesn't say but he hears anyway.

* * *

><p>The harsh, wracking sound of his coughs bounce off the steel walls, twisting in the sharp angles and echoing off-key. His body sinks into the worn mattress, drained just from the effort of breathing. It would be pathetic if he wasn't so tired.<p>

"Hello, John." He can just about see Toby standing guard at the door before it closes behind her; still standing in exactly the same spot, which is expected and all, but it seems like machines should have _some_ kind of equivalent to a muscle cramp, creaky joints maybe, but considering they can regrow _skin_ all on their own, maybe –

"John?"

"How are they?"

"The same." When humanity is on a downward spiral, the same means worse. Worse is dying out, decaying; a secret on the verge of being divulged. "We found them."

"What?"

"We found them." She deposits – because dump, toss, drop are words that don't convey the precision with which she does so – an unavoidably tattered stack of papers on his – their, her – desk. (As it turns out, there's only so many times you can re-process, re-bleach, re-constitute paper before it starts getting a little less than pristine.) So the charts, maps, reports spill over despite her.

But she has his attention. He pushes the fatigue away, himself out of bed, the urge to cough down, and pretends neither of them notice that his hands aren't quite steady when she hands him the first of the lot. The equator is a comfortingly familiar line bisecting the page; _x_ marks the spot.

"Just where you thought, then. Good to know habits transcend universes."

"Good to know." She gives him exactly nine minutes to read the brief, which means his eyes have just reached the end of the last sentence when she speaks again. "How should we proceed?"

For a few moments, there's only the sound of his breathing, laboured and coarse and he hates how he can _feel_ her measuring the rise and fall of his chest, analyzing the soundwaves for the crackle of fluid. He hates this even more: "Can we trust them?"

"I don't know, John. The memories you extracted are incomplete."

He knows this. He _knows_ and it's threatening to burst out of him, how much he hates the way she reminds him as if it's dementia that's plaguing him, the way humanity can't seem to let go of their _stupid_ faith in him, the way this future is crumbling.

"If the relays are ready, make contact," is all he says instead, and doesn't manage to suppress the next fit before she leaves.

Seeing gets spotty and it feels like his bones are rattling with every cough. When it's over, her seat is vacant and he's leaning on her just enough to make him feel like he might fall over if she moves. The thought makes him nauseated; he tightens his muscles in response, forces his body to do what he tells it and right now, that's to _not_ need anyone else just to function. _Fucking pathetic._

He sits upright, rigid with effort, and tells himself that he'll stand in a minute and leave this godforsaken room (he will), tells himself that he doesn't feel lonely as hell feeling her fingers stroking the back of his neck (he does).

(It's one of those days.)

* * *

><p>She wishes they would just extract her already. She's sick of the war, sick of being hungry and tired and dirty, sick of humanity. Whining, whinging, weak humanity. But she hasn't thought of herself as human in years and suppresses the impatience until it's a tiny knot tucked somewhere behind her heart.<p>

This is how to be strong. And she is. She's stronger than any of them, better than any of them. Better than even Connor, revered for the illusion of insight that comes from time and knowing, because Connor is weak and she is strong and knowing isn't his alone. She wields hers with precision.

The transmission is complete by the time her meal rotation begins and the crew of the Jimmy Carter is easy enough to spot in the half-filled mess hall. Someone pulls up a chair when she pauses at the head of their table, tray in hand and half-smile in request. Names make their way around mouthfuls of food and she'll pretend to forget them at first because faults are disarming. She's very good at disarming.

She tosses her conspicuous hair back and her smile lights up her freckled face when the introductions come full circle: "Savannah Weaver."

* * *

><p>"Was it him, then? Was it Fischer?"<p>

Derek clenches his jaw so tightly she can feel it where their heads touch. "Yeah, it was him."

"That fucking bastard. Traitorous little piece of _shit_." Her hands are gesturing wildly in her agitation and it's a mix of deftness and luck that he manages to catch them before she smacks him by accident.

"Hey. _Hey._ It was already a tiny bed with just me on it and I'm already beat up enough, so stop flailing."

Jesse twists in his arms and presses a dry kiss to his rough, stubbly chin in apology. "I'm going to kill him."

His hand slides up her side, feeling the ridge of every rib and the unnatural smoothness of tiny near-invisible scars, until his thumb finds the curve of her breast, stroking the soft unblemished skin absently. "You'd have to find him first."

"Oh, I will." She catches his bottom lip between her teeth, nips and soothes the tender flesh with her tongue when he hisses. One slender arm comes up around his head, a pointy elbow just touching the soft spot in his shoulder; in another minute she'll pin him down and toss her hair over one shoulder and smirk and kiss and stroke and grind until he begs – he's smiling, just a little, in anticipation.

Her short nails scrape along scars, old and new, finding the marks even where they can't quite be seen; she knows them.

"I'm going to kill him," she breathes against him.

He knows the sharp angle of her hips, the sloping line of her back, the fierceness in her warm eyes; all soft and hard is how he knows her. "I love you."

She hides her smile in a kiss, but he can feel the tiniest curve of lips against his. It's stupid, but he feels like laughing.

* * *

><p>"Sophie, your mother's here!" The older woman smiles in a way that's half apology and half amused, <em>kids – what can you do?<em>

"Sophia." Savannah's voice cuts through the din to the ears of a under-sized girl, and why not – it's been the difference between life and death too many times in her six (and a half) years to be ignorable now. "Come here."

She obeys, of course. She likes the child centre and she thinks the other kids are mostly okay, but she never resents the end of the day. Mom's hand is cool and dry and when it tightens around her smaller one, she feels the familiar mantle of protection settle invisibly around her. _Rule 1: Nothing is safe, Sophia_. Nothing except for Mom and the space under her bed. But she never says that out loud.

She waves a silent goodbye to Miss Kathleen, who has the ugly line in her forehead again which is okay because most people don't seem to like Mom very much anyway. No one stops them on the way and she stays silent until they reach the family living network. She has to tilt her head far back enough to make her neck hurt to look him in the face: "Hello, Nathaniel."

The guard's lips stretch in a way that she's known him long enough to recognize as a smile on an otherwise unexpressive face; Nathaniel is a cyb and Mom says that the rest of the motors or something in his face are broken. (She's still working up the courage to ask if it hurts.) "Hello, Sophia."

It's two steps before she feels the tug on her hand and realizes that Mom isn't moving.

"Any word?"

Mom shakes her head, making her long ponytail swish. "Nothing yet. Have you found a messenger?"

"Yes. A captain."

"Is he true?"

"He recognizes the necessity."

"Fine. I'll tell them." Mom glances at her, just for a second. "If they go back, I'll need her delivered."

"It won't be a problem."

Sophia wonders who _her_ is.


End file.
